Lorenzo Lotto

Lorenzo Lotto (b. 1480–d. 1556/7), a Venetian born artist who lived and worked in regional towns in the Veneto and the Marche, was one of the most experimental painters of his generation. A contemporary of Giorgione, Titian, Carpaccio, Savoldo, and Palma il Vecchio, Lotto drew inspiration not only from his Venetian peers and painters of the prior generation, including Cima da Conegliano and Giovanni Bellini, but also from artistic traditions in central and northern Italy and north of the Alps. Unlike Titian, who painted in the service of princes and popes, Lotto worked for sophisticated, upwardly mobile members of the merchant class (cittadini), regional nobles, and civic confraternities, for whom he painted devotional subjects, public altarpieces, portraits, and a handful of mythological allegories. During his formative years, he painted in Treviso under the patronage of Bishop Bernardo de’Rossi (1503–1506), in Recanati, where he completed his first major altarpiece in 1508, the Recanati Polyptych, and in Rome (c. 1509–1510), when he joined Raphael and his many acolytes in the Vatican Stanze. Following a decade of travels in the Veneto and central Italy (with his first extended sojourn in the Marche from late 1509 to 1513), Lotto’s vocabulary of motifs and regional styles coalesced during a lengthy sojourn in Bergamo (1513–1525). During this period, he embarked on the two most ambitious projects of his career: an extensive program of designs for painterly intarsia (wood inlay) panels, carried out in collaboration with the intarsiatore Giovanni Capoferri, to adorn the choir stalls of Santa Maria Maggiore (1524–1531) and an elaborate fresco cycle in the Oratorio Suardi (1524), a villa oratory commissioned by a Bergamasque noble family in the nearby countryside. Lotto’s idiosyncratic style fully flowered upon his return to his native Venice (1525–1533), where he continued to produce devotional panels and altarpieces; most notably, the San Nicola Altarpiece at Santa Maria dei Carmini (1527–1529), his first public altarpiece in the Serenissima, and painted his best-known portraits, including Andrea Odoni and his Collection (1527) and a portrait of a Lady as Lucretia (c. 1530–1533). The last two decades of his career were spent between Venice and the Marche, where Lotto revisited and reworked themes and motifs in public altarpieces, intimate devotional works, and portraits produced in a variety of regional locales, including Jesi, Cingoli, and Recanati. Lotto lived out his final years at the Santa Casa in Loreto, where he became a lay brother in 1554 and died two years later, between 1556 and 1557.