The exhibition at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara recounts the vicissitudes of painting in the early 16th century in Ferrara, from the years of the handover from Duke Ercole I d'Este to his son Alfonso I (1505), until the latter's death (1534), a refined patron of great ambitions, capable of renovating the private spaces of the court as well as the public spaces of the city.
The waning of the generation of Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de' Roberti presented Ferrara with the difficult challenge of a high-level artistic replacement. At the beginning of the new century, a new school developed, more open to exchanges with other centres, with four masters as protagonists: Ludovico Mazzolino, a painter with a whimsical flair who steered his language in an anti-classical direction; Giovan Battista Benvenuti known as l'Ortolano, still characterised instead by a convinced and sincere naturalism; Benvenuto Tisi known as il Garofalo, the main local interpreter of Raphael's manner; and Giovanni Luteri known as il Dosso, who developed an original style, cultured and amused, influenced as much by Giorgione and Titian as by Michelangelo's Rome.
The exhibition will take the visitor through an incredibly rich season, where the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, history and fairytale come together in a figurative world that can be defined, in a word, as Ferrara.