Exhibition
Lorenzo Lotto may not have worked for the grandees of the age, but, from the fringes, he caught the human face of the Renaissance, says Michael Prodger
IN the National Gallery’s wonderful exhibition of portraits by Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1557), there is one face missing: the painter’s own. Like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, however, his personality is present and in his pictures of others can be traced some of the features of his life, if not his physiognomy.
His is, in many ways, a sad story. He was born in Venice in 1480 and so was of the same generation as Titian and Giorgione, greater talents who, with Giovanni Bellini, came to represent Venetian art at its apogee. Lotto’s fate was to be overshadowed: outshone in Venice, he worked instead in the off-grid cities of the mainland, such as Treviso, Bergamo and Ancona.
Even when he was invited to Rome in 1508, to decorate the papal apartments, he found himself left in the wake of the brilliant Raphael and his work was destroyed only a few years after completion.
In later life, he was beset by money worries. ‘Art did not earn me what I spent,’ he wrote and, when he staged a public lottery of his work, only six pictures sold. Increasing depression left him, he said, ‘alone and with no trustworthy guide and very anxious of mind’. In 1552, he gave up his professional career, retreated from the world and became a Dominican lay brother at the Holy House at Loreto.
However, Lotto was no mere also-ran, but a major-minor painter, whose distinctive portraits made a profound contribution to the development of that still relatively new genre. He pioneered the wide-format double portrait, especially suited to husband-and-wife paintings, and was one of the first artists to specialise in crypto-portraits —putting real people into narrative or religious scenes.
His sitters may have been middle-class merchants, artisans and scholars rather than the dukes, princes and their consorts of the age, but what they lacked in status, he supplied in innovation and a sumptuous technique.
Lotto’s novel turn of mind can be seen clearly in the first of his marriage portraits, painted in 1523 and showing the wedding of a Bergamesque cloth merchant, Marsilio Cassotti, and
Lotto’s portraits made a profound contribution to the genre
Faustina Assonica from a local patrician family. As Marsilio slips a ring on to his wife’s finger, a cupid places a yoke made from laurel wood across the couple’s shoulders—a symbol of their mutual duties and imperishable love (as well as a reference to the painter’s own name).
The pair are gorgeously dressed and Faustina wears a cameo round her neck showing her Roman namesake, long hailed as the epitome of spousal rectitude. Among all this symbolism and the sheer richness of the apparel—this was clearly a marriage about wealth and status as well as love—is a typical Lotto touch: the cupid looks at Marsilio with something between a grin, a leer and a wink.
This little bit of sly humour amid the gravity is an acknowledgement that the groom has done well for himself and a nod, too, perhaps, at the impending pleasures of the wedding night.
Such humanising touches can be felt throughout, even in an altarpiece, such as his 1506 The Virgin in Glory between Saints Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse (it is in the exhibition because the rather elderly Virgin is, in fact, a portrait of the deposed Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus). What catches the eye, however, is the pose of Saint Anthony, arms casually crossed on his staff as if he has stopped on a countryside ramble to admire the view, rather than gaze on the mother of Christ.
In The Physician Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his Son, Niccolò (1515–16), a fly lands unobserved on the father’s handkerchief. In his portrait of the collector Andrea Odoni (1527), Lotto touches greatness: even as he shows Odoni in a beautiful fur-trimmed robe grandiosely inviting the viewer in to relish his antiquities, he pricks his pomposity with a small bronze figure in the background representing Hercules urinating.
Perhaps the most touching gesture, however, is that of Brother Gregorio Belo of Vicenza, one of the Poor Hermits of St Jerome, in his portrait of 1547. In this austere and dun-coloured image, Gregorio beats his chest with a closed fist as he contemplates Christ’s crucifixion. It is hard not to feel that, with his habitual empathy, this is Lotto, too, turning ever more to faith as his travails increase and the material world with the colour and glitter he had always portrayed so beautifully loosens its hold on him. ‘Lorenzo Lotto Portraits’ is at the National Gallery, London WC2, until February 10, 2019 (020–7747 2885; www. nationalgallery.org.uk) Next week Patrick Heron at Turner Contemporary