Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape

Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape by Dosso Dossi of ca. 1525 is one of the most celebrated mythological paintings of the High Renaissance, remarkable for its atmospheric landscape setting, its complex allegorical programme, and its suggestion of an erotic magic that hovers between enchantment and threat. Circe — the sorceress of the Odyssey who transformed Odysseus's men into animals — is shown in a twilight forest surrounded by her transformed lovers, each reduced to a creature that embodies his dominant passion. The work was probably painted for the Este court at Ferrara, where Ariosto was writing his Orlando Furioso and mythological allegory was the preferred mode of both literary and visual culture. Dosso's distinctive contribution was to set the narrative in a landscape of brooding atmospheric power that becomes as important as the figures themselves.

Dosso achieves the painting's spell-like atmosphere through the management of light — a warm, ambiguous illumination that could be late afternoon or magical night — and his characteristic blurring of the boundaries between figures and the enveloping landscape. The paint surface has the dense, glazed richness of his mature manner.