November 2008

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Although the scope of these publications did not permit a proper exploration of the parallel implications for Dosso’s companion, this task has now been undertaken by Lucco and Danieli. It is clear from their analysis that Dosso’s influence on Garofalo is already evident, alongside that of Raphael, in the beautiful altarpiece, signed and dated 1513, from the small town of Argenta, in the province of Ferrara. From the same phase, rather than a decade later, is the Virgin and Child with St Michael and the Holy Family (Galleria Borghese, Rome): thus while the strongly Raphaelesque Virgin closely resembles her sister from Argenta, the taste for thickly impasted fringes of drapery finds close parallels in the Costabili Polyptych. Slightly more surprising, but convincing, is the redating to the same early phase of the looming close-up of St James from the Pitti, with its nocturnal lighting and its mysterious distant vignette of the arrest of Christ.

The discovery of the Costabili documents, combined with Garofalo’s considerate habit of signing and dating many of his most important works, ought by rights to have removed all problems relating to his stylistic development. This is not so, however, because as shown very clearly by the paintings on display, he responded during the course of his career to a wide range of influences and circumstances. Even his response to Raphael was not the result of a sudden, decisive conversion during a visit to Rome; rather, he seems already to have known his work at second hand, and continued to develop different aspects of his interest in the years that followed. Curiously, Garofalo seems not to have been affected by the splendid series of Bacchanals by Titian, which arrived in Ferrara between 1517 and 1523; and nor apparently did he notice Michelangelo when in Rome, or any subsequent north Italian manifestations of Michelangelism. He did, however, respond creatively to a wide range of other artists, from Boccaccio Boccaccino and Lorenzo Costa in his early career, to Fra Bartolomeo in the second decade, and to Giulio Romano in the 1530s and 40s – and even to Dürer and Rogier van der Weyden. The Holy Family from Frankfurt, for example, tentatively dated by Danieli to the mid-1520s, is clearly based on a version of one of the panels of Rogier’s Miraflores Triptych.