November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

Despite the speed with which the exhibition has had to be organised, it includes a large number of loans from other European collections, some of them pictures that are very little known, and together they provide a reasonably balanced representation of the successive phases of the painter’s long career. With the exception of a crucial early masterpiece, the Suxena Altarpiece, painted in 1514 directly after the trip to Rome, the mostly large-scale paintings housed in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in the nearby Palazzo dei Diamanti, many of them likewise altar paintings, have sensibly not been moved to the Castello. Although not officially part of the show, most of these key works have usefully been given entries in the exhibition catalogue; and since the lion’s share of the entries are written by a single scholar, Michele Danieli, working closely with the co-organiser, Mauro Lucco, the catalogue has an unusually strong intellectual coherence. Indeed, in many respects, it may now be regarded as the primary work on the painter, although the 1993 monograph by Anna Maria Fioravanti Baraldi still provides the most comprehensive catalogue.

Particularly important is Lucco and Danieli’s account of Garofalo’s chronology, especially in the light of the publication by Adriano Franceschini in 1995 of the new documents relating to the monumental Costabili Polyptych, a joint work by Garofalo and Dosso (Pinacoteca Nazionale). The documents showed that the two painters were already at work on the polyptych in 1513-14 – a full decade earlier than had previously been thought. The implications of this discovery for the understanding of the early career of Dosso were first discussed by Lucco and myself in Apollo in 1998, and were developed in the catalogue of the Dosso exhibition of the same year.