Cosme Tura, Renaissance artist and designer. (Current and Coming).(Brief Article)

Enigmatic artists who are not easily categorized tend to fall between the cracks of art history. One such figure is Cosme Turn, a fifteenth-century native of Ferrara whose expressive and agonizing paintings reflect the influence of northern European art. At the same time they have a singular quality that makes it difficult to relate Turn to his contemporaries, particularly those working in cities we more readily associate with the Renaissance, such as Florence.

There was scholarly interest in Ferrara and Turn in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the great American collector Isabella Stewart Gardner was purchasing Renaissance art, including Turn's Circumcision of Christ, for her Italian palazzo on Boston's Fenway. Perhaps she was drawn to his work because she shared her name with one of Ferrarn's most learned and interesting patronesses of the arts, Isabella d'Este. Bernard Berenson recognized the parallel when he offered her a portrait that was then thought to depict Isabella d'Este He wrote, "it is a portrait of the grandest and most fascinating lady of the Renaissance--your worthy precursor and patron saint--Isabella d'Este."

More recently, scholarly interest in Turn has surged, and he is now the subject of the first monographic exhibition devoted to his work, which has appropriately been organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where it is on view until May 12. ...