Mezzetti dates the painting to around 1519, while Ballarin anticipates it to the years 1515-16, when the painter was already resident at the court of Ferrara and the famous chambers of Alfonso I d’Este were being prepared, for which Titian himself was called to work in the castle.
The panel is part of the artist’s small-format production – also dear to his brother Battista – in which the seduction of landscape is stronger and which was very successful at court, as demonstrated by the long list of small works exhibited in the inventory of famous paintings in the noble apartment of the Ducal Palace of Modena, drawn up in 1663 by the consignor of the collections, Don Giovanni Donzi, where paintings attributed to the Dossis from Ferrara are mentioned (Bentini – Curti 1990). Ballarin rightly feels the need to distinguish this large production into groups of homogeneous works, but not by subject, but rather by chronological order in comparison with larger-format works.
The Zingarella di Parma, rendered with strong luminosity of touches and speed of brushstrokes, shows Dosso now mature in his unmistakable way of painting the branches as well as of raising the tones of the details in light (the fringes of the sheet or the shrubs in the foreground), even if the compositional style still registers a closed and tight modeling. The Venetian style of the landscape is strong, close to that of the Tre età of New York, while in the sweet gesture of the absorbed Virgin, of a physiognomic oval in the style of Mazzolino, one might be surprised by an affinity with the young Correggio of the first recognized Conversazioni rather than a reflection of Aspertini, as glimpsed by Arslan (1957) and Mezzetti (1965), who linked this example to the one in the Institute of Art in Detroit, richer in details, but of less elevated quality, in which undoubtedly the grotesque flavor of the Bolognese drags Dosso towards a rustic interpretation of the subject.
The recent discovery of the starting date of the Polittico Constabili, until now thought to be a work executed in the third decade of the century in collaboration with the older Garofalo – instead set at 1513 – supports the hypothesis of an anticipation of this panel in which the small group also seems to echo, by defect, the Raphaelesque Madonna del diadema.
Card by Jadranka Bentini, taken from Fornari Schianchi L. (edited by), Galleria Nazionale di Parma. Catalogue of works. Il Cinquecento, Franco Maria Ricci, Milan, 1998.