Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape

A pale enchantress sits on a rock beneath a tree, her crown of flowers and her gaze turned away, one hand tracing the inscribed tablet she cradles while a white wading bird dips into the pool at her feet and dogs, deer and a buck gather around her in spellbound attendance. Dosso Dossi, court painter to the dukes of Ferrara, made this picture of Circe about 1525, and no other artist of the Renaissance so thoroughly surrendered the story to atmosphere: the open book of diagrams, the hawk and owl in the branches, the sandy path winding toward a wooden building under a topaz haze — every detail floats in the same dreaming, half-lit air, as if the sorceress’s power extended to the weather of the painting itself. The canvas passed through the celebrated London collection of Robert and Evelyn Benson before entering the Samuel H. Kress Collection, and was given to the National Gallery of Art in 1943. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.