THE camerin d’alabastro (alabaster room) – one of the private apartments connecting the Castelle Estense and the Palazzo Ducale in Ferrara – was created for Duke Alfonso I D’Este as housing a collection of paintings famous throughout Italy. Among the masterpieces were works by Giovanni Bellini (The Feast of the Gods1514), Titian (three canvases, including Bacchus and Ariadne1519-23, now in the National Gallery, London), and the Aeneas Friesland (circa 1520) by the court painter Dosso Dossi. Dossi’s frieze – consisting of ten canvases of episodes from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid– and the rest of the contents of the camerino, were dispersed when Alfonso’s grandson, Alfonso II, died without an heir in 1597 and the collection fell, by feudal law, into the hands of the papacy.
The Dossi frieze joined the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese to decorate his villa – now the Galleria Borghese, Rome – and was later moved to Spain. Today, the Galleria Borghese brings together five of the paintings for the first exhibition dedicated to Dossi’s frieze. The location of the majority of the paintings was, until recently, unknown. “Until the late 1990s, we only knew about three of the ten paintings,” says curator Marina Minozzi. “Now we have located seven of them.”
At Dosso-Dossi Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan coast (around 1520) National Gallery of Art, Washington
The Rome exhibition will include sections of the frieze on loan from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and private collections. “These are works of great originality,” says Minozzi. Their impact is still staggering today.
However, all known Aeneas paintings will be exhibited: part of the frieze belonging to the National Gallery of Canada was deemed too fragile to be transported to Italy, while another held by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham may not appear in due to “logistical problems”. While research on the frieze progresses, says Minozzi, the work remains shrouded in mystery. “Art historians are still unsure of the sequence of the panels,” she says. “Even today, there is so much to discover about this magnificent work.”
• Dosso Dossi: the Frieze of AeneasGalleria Borghese, Rome, April 4-July 11
