Lotto, Lorenzo

LOTTO, LORENZO. - Painter, b. in Venice (?) around 1480, d. in Loreto in Sept. 1556. Already in his earliest works, his personality reveals itself in the acute search for every luminous vibration. The masterpiece of this early activity, carried out between Treviso and the Marche, is the polyptych of Recanati, from 1508.

In 1509 he is in Rome, where his unconvinced adherence to Raphael's manner brings a temporary imbalance to his art (Deposition of Jesi; Transfiguration of Recanati), but leads him to a broadly sixteenth-century vision. In Bergamo (1513-26), he passes from the composure of the altarpiece of St. Bartholomew (1516) to the bold fantasies of the altarpieces of St. Bernardino and St. Spirito (1521), among the highest expressions of his genius. From this period are remembered the Farewell of Christ from His Mother in Berlin, the Marriage of St. Catherine in the Carrara Gallery in Bergamo, the Sacra conversazione, now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the frescoes of the Suardi chapel at Trescore Balneario and those of St. Michael at Pozzo Bianco in Bergamo. The same chromatic sharpness is seen again in the works painted in the Marche (altarpiece of the Museum of Jesi of 1526; Annunciation, ibid.; Annunciation at Recanati). In 1529 the journey to Venice marks, with the Carmine altarpiece, a rapprochement with Titian, momentary because immediately afterward, having returned to the Marche, he returns to expressions of Nordic romanticism in the altarpiece of St. Lucy at Jesi, in which the predellas show an impressionistic freedom of touch of a disconcerting modernity. Masterpieces of these years are the great Crucifixion of St. Maria in Telusiano at Montesangiusto (1531), the Sacra conversazione of Vienna, the altarpiece of Cingoli (1539). The return and the prolonged stay in the Veneto (between Venice and Treviso) from 1540 to 1549 mark a new rapprochement with Titian (altarpiece of S. Zanipolo, of 1542; St. Jerome of the Prado), by which, however, the personality of L. does not appear overwhelmed, but only checked in its romantic impetuses. From this time are also some of the most beautiful among the many Lotto portraits (Milan, Brera). Little remains of the very many works that L. executed in his last years in the Marche, where he had been called in 1550 to paint the great altarpiece of the Assumption for St. Francis of Ancona, now much damaged. In the last ones, which are found in the Apostolic Palace of Loreto, where the artist in 1547 had become an oblate of the Holy House, the forms are as if consumed in the rarefied atmosphere. This extreme sensitivity to every luminous vibration is the dominant character in the most varied aspects that the work of L. assumes from time to time, reflecting the variety of the experiences of his nomadic life and his romantic spirit.

Emma Zocca