Cosmè Tura (ca. 1430-1495) was one of the great painters of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the most original artists from the generation of Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci. His extraordinary works bear witness to the unique artistic culture of his native city of Ferrara, and to the cosmopolitan tastes of the ruling Este family. In many respects, his work responds to the fact that Ferrara was an artistic crossroads, drawing artists from throughout Italy, as well as from beyond the Alps. Although influenced by developments in Florence, Padua, and elsewhere, Tura conspicuously departed from these models, and transformed them into a distinctively Ferrarese pictorial language which would be expressive of a prestigious local identity. Tura's art has an intense expressive power which is specially striking to admirers of twentieth-century art. Combined with an ornamental extravagance of color, calligraphic line, and bizarre detail, it retains a remarkable capacity both to shock and to fascinate.

The exhibition presents the full range of Tura's output in various media: not only panel paintings and drawings loaned from several European and North American collections, but examples of tapestry, bronze medals, and manuscript illumination, all based on his designs. Indeed Tura was most often employed by the Este court as a designer of tapestries, festival decorations, and metalwork. He was also a technical innovator who carefully studied the oil painting methods of the Netherlandish artists brought to Ferrara by the court.

The fact that Tura is not today better known, and that he has largely been eclipsed by his more famous contemporaries, is the result of a number of historical misadventures. One of these is the destruction, through accident or neglect, of most of his artistic output, which can now only be studied in the form of fragments widely dispersed in museums. The Gardner Museum's exhibition is not only the first ever devoted to the artist, but reunites scattered parts of a pictorial ensemble which have not been seen together since the eighteenth century.

--Stephen Campbell

Stephen Campbell, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania, is the guest curator of the exhibition and author of the catalogue.