LOTTO, LORENZO

An itinerant artist in sixteenth-century northern Italy, Lorenzo Lotto possessed an inventive artistic power that expressed itself in original and expressive paint­ings. While Lotto was born in Venice, Italy, he spent only brief interludes there. His artistic style responded to his peripatetic lifestyle, constantly changing as he reacted to the artistic scene around him. Lotto incorporated aspects from Venetian colorism to Roman and Emilian Mannerism without losing his own style, which embodied an inventiveness, expressiveness, and rich and vibrant colors. By 1503 he was in Treviso, Italy, a city located on an important trade route to southern Germany, where he began to mature, considering art from a wider range of examples, such as Albrecht Durer.* In 1509 he traveled to Rome, where he painted a ceiling, now destroyed, in the Vatican Palace.The period between 1513 and 1525 in Bergamo was extremely productive. Lotto soon showed his skill in the painting of altarpieces and also proved himself to be a gifted frescoist. In further recognition of his talent and creativity in Bergamo, Lotto received a commission to provide the designs for sixty-eight intarsia pan­els for the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Lotto's inventiveness may be seen in his Annunciation (Recanati, Pinacoteca, 1527), in which he showed an anx­ious Mary facing away from the angel, and in theSaint Lucy Altarpiece(Jesi, Biblioteca) with its intensity of emotions and lack of narrative solution in the central scene.

A talented and original portraitist, Lotto used objects and settings to provide a great deal of information about the sitters, portraying their character and telling stories about them, sometimes even revealing their inner feelings. In 1554 Lotto entered the religious community of the Holy Sanctuary at Loreto, where he died two years later. Although Lotto worked on the artistic margin of Venice, his independent and distinctive art that embodied his very character was in demand throughout northern Italy.

Peter Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 1997.