Dosso Dossi has long been considered one of Renaissance Italy's most intriguing artists. Although a wealth of documents chronicles his life, he remains, in many ways, an enigma, and his art continues to be as elusive as it is compelling. In Dosso's Fate, leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines examine the social, intellectual, and historical contexts of his art, focusing on the development of new genres of painting, questions of style and chronology, the influence of courtly culture, and the work of his collaborators, as well as his visual and literary sources and his painting technique. The result is an important and original contribution not only to literature on Dosso Dossi but also to the study of cultural history in early modern Italy.

Dosso's rich color schemes are akin to those of his fellow North Italian Titian; he learned something about innovative composition from Raphael and about the force of the body from Michelangelo. But his paintings have a very individual appeal. In leafy natural surroundings containing an array of animals and heavenly bodies, events unfold that are often enigmatic, enacted by characters whose interrelationships elude definition.

Hermann Böschenstein, born in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland in 1900, did his doctorate in Rostock under Emil Utziz and came to Canada in the 1920's, first as a tourist and then as a permanent immigrant. He spent over fifty years in Canada as a teacher and scholar, becoming Head of the University of Toronto's Department of German and one of Canada's leading Germanists. Among his many publications on German Literature his two-volume Deutsche Gefühlskultur (1954 and 1966) remains an unique attempt to chart the development of feeling as expressed in German Literature since the Enlightenment. This present volume gathers together his essays in English on German Literature which demonstrate his life-long endeavour to seek out and promote those humanistic values that are embodied in great literature.