Cobblestoned piazzas evaporating in the winter mists. A Duomo façade that’s been likened to a Mississippi paddlewheeler making its way up the Po River. The ghost of Parisina d’Este haunting the Castello Estense after her ruthless husband, Nicolò III, had her executed for having an affair with her stepson. Ludovico Ariosto writing Orlando furioso; Torquato Tasso penning Gerusalemme liberata. Centuries later, film director Michelangelo Antonioni shooting through those same mists, and novelist Giorgio Bassani chronicling the disappearance, during World War II, of the Jewish community that had flourished under the tolerant rule of the Este dukes.

Lying on the road from Bologna to Venice, Ferrara has always been something of a lost city, stranded in tourist limbo between central Italy and the northeast. During the Renaissance, the glitter of its Este court was eclipsed by that of the Medici in Florence and by the Byzantine splendor of Venice and Ravenna. Even its modern artists are undervalued: Antonioni (L’avventura, Blow-Up, The Passenger), one of the great directors of the past century, was overshadowed by the more flamboyant Federico Fellini, and Bassani (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini) was more deserving of the Nobel Prize than many who received it.

Then there’s Cosmè Tura, who worked off and on for the Este court in the mid 15th century, designing metalwork and ceramics and tapestries and doing a little painting as well. Time has not been as kind to Ferrara as it has to Florence. In 1598 the papacy forced the Este dukes to move to Modena, and little of Tura’s work survived: a small number of panel paintings, an even smaller number of canvases, and three drawings. In the English-speaking world, he was hardly even famous enough to be forgotten; but one of his paintings, The Circumcision of Christ, was acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner, and it has inspired this year’s Gardner special show, an exhibit that upholds the standards set by its Botticelli (1997), Titian & Rubens (1998), " Threads of Dissent " (1999), and Rembrandt (2000) predecessors.

In the art world, at least, Tura is a hot topic just now, being the subject of three monographs over the past five years, including one by the University of Pennsylvania’s Stephen Campbell, who with the Gardner’s Alan Chong curated this show. Does that mean he’s now respected and understood? Not exactly: Joseph Manca’s recent Cosmè Tura: The Life and Art of a Painter in Estense Ferrara still presents him as a " court " artist whose major achievement was to protect the Este dukes from " boredom and the consequent tedious cares that accompany it. " Campbell and Chong know better: the Tura they give us, in this show and in its accompanying hardbound catalogue (303 pages, $48), anticipates the genius of Antonioni and Bassani, but at bottom he’s the David Lynch of the Renaissance, the twisted cousin of Botticelli and Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. " Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara " hypothesizes the Renaissance as an ellipse, with Florence and Ferrara as its two foci. And it delivers on that hypothesis.

Tura and Ferrara were, as Campbell and Chong also know, part of a more complex picture. Set in the middle of nowhere, Ferrara was everywhere in its interests. Tura would have seen the contorted work of Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden (think of Rogier as being to Jan van Eyck what Cosmè was to Fra Angelico); he may have visited Padua or Venice. His work fits into a continuum that stretches from Andrea Mantegna (Padua and then Mantua) to the even more perverse Carlo Crivelli (Venice and then the Marches). For the serene Neoplatonism that ruled in Florence (its art, I mean — Florentine politics have never been serene), Ferrara substitutes an obsession with the senses, with the tortured nature of real life.

I wonder whether Tura’s sinuous line and sensuous surfaces don’t owe something to the pervasive Celtic influence in northern Italy (Vergil, Catullus, and Tibullus have Celtic names, as do Torino, Milan, and Bologna). Certainly there’s a hint of Celtic sensibility in his Pietà, which is the centerpiece of this show. It’s the dead Christ who first catches your eye: his head and chest seem too big for the rest of his angular body, and both the frozen rictus of his mouth and his crossed feet (as if still nailed to the cross) suggest an advanced stage of rigor mortis — what does this augur for the Resurrection? Seated on the empty tomb, Mary is as compositionally concise as she would be in any Madonna; far from being histrionic, she seems transfixed by the beauty of her son’s hand, as if nothing else mattered at this moment. The drapery of her robe is a story in itself (this is always the case with Tura) — compare the way that Antonioni’s camera would wander off to consider the geometry of objects whenever it found the humans in its purview insufficiently interesting. Behind Mary rises Calvary, as if the Crucifixion had sprung fully formed, Athena-like, from her head, the two thieves still suspended high in the air. Two workman carry off the ladder of the Deposition; on the left, a monkey appears in an orange tree. Life goes on.

The corollary to this work — not in the show but well reproduced in the catalogue — is the enthroned Muse (possibly Calliope) who formed part of a complete series of nine begun by Angelo Maccagnino da Siena. This lady has attitude: she looks disdainfully at the viewer, and her left hand — not a dainty one — rests defiantly on her left thigh, as if to say, " You call that art? " The crimson-and-gold luxuriance of her garment proclaims her the Muse of finery as well as epic poetry; the six toothed sea monsters (with ruby eyes) that encrust her throne posit her as a Madonna of the Thorns.

Tura’s saints aren’t classical idealizations either. Saint George looks like a young Renaissance dandy, with his fashionable cap and tousled red hair and hint of anomie — and that nose could never belong to more than one person. Saint Louis of Toulouse also looks bored as he lifts his exquisite red bishop’s chasuble to reveal the gray Franciscan robe underneath; he seems to be saying that at heart he’s a simple friar, but given the way the robe molds his leg, and the gold ground on which he’s presented, you might wonder what Tura’s really trying to tell us about him. Similar modeling informs Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Jerome (neither is in the show but both are in the catalogue). Anthony oozes with carnality despite his demure expression; Jerome, half naked and on one knee, could be imploring a lover (or the Holy Spirit) to return. In the tondo The Martyrdom of Saint Maurelius, the saint himself is a small unprepossessing figure awaiting the stroke of the executioner’s sword, but the executioner and the four guards are wearing skin-tight tunics (you can see every muscle) and short pleated skirts that show off their legs. The swirling red banner above seems to promise a festive occasion.

Tura’s world, then, is one where the five senses keep interrupting your train of thought. The Virgin of the Annunciation that’s in the Galleria Colonna in Rome is, contrary to Annunciation iconology, turned to the right, and she seems annoyed that God’s messenger dove has interrupted her meditation: " All right, I’m going to have God’s baby, anything else? " The donkey that bears Mary in The Flight into Egypt is twisting round to smell or taste something, with the result that Mary looks ready to fall off (compare the placid donkey of Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua). In other representations of the Circumcisions, the infant Jesus, aware that this shedding of blood prefigures his Passion, rises above the painful moment; in the Gardner’s Tura tondo, he turns away it.

In Antonioni’s film Il deserto rosso, there’s a moment where a panicked Giuliana watches as the forms of her husband and her friends disappear in a sea of fog. And she dreams the ground is slipping out from under her. In Bassani’s novels, too, reality is elusive: the " garden " of the Finzi-Contini is the world of other people that we’re never able to enter. Perhaps Cosmè Tura’s jewel-like surfaces and sculptured fabrics are his response to the Po Valley mists that enveloped Ferrara. Like David Lynch, he sets you up in a world that’s solid and firm and reassuring. And then he pulls it out from under you.

As is the custom with the Gardner Museum’s special exhibitions, " Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara " will be accompanied by a number of related events. Tonight, February 7, at 6:30 p.m., Harvard University’s Lewis Lockwood will lecture on " What Tura Heard: Music in Renaissance Ferrara. " This Sunday, February 10, at 1:30 p.m., the Boston Camerata will present a concert of music from Renaissance Ferrara. And on Saturday March 2, from 9 to 4 p.m., the Gardner will host a scholarly symposium devoted to " The Renaissance Court Artist. " For information, call (617) 278-5101.