Lotto: A Winner After 500 Years
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 28, 1998
LORENZO LOTTO
Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Until March 1
Accademia Carrara di Belli Arti, Bergamo, Italy
April 2 to June 28
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris
October 12 to January 11, 1999
Saints carrying squirrels, squabbling angels, extraneous grasshoppers - even green socks, for goodness sake. Who is this painter? One of the neglected Italian masters, that's who. Unlike green socks, Lorenzo Lotto is back in fashion.
THERE must be few artists whose reputation has never wavered, either in their lifetime or post-humously. Michelangelo and Leonardo are the outstanding examples, despite the latter's notorious inability to finish his paintings.
It is more common for a celebrated master to fall out of favour only a few years after his death, if only because of changing fashions in art and taste. Many of these lost souls - the pompous academicians, the guardians of official taste - have deserved their fate, but a similar neglect settled on artists we now consider to be among the all-time greats, notably Rembrandt and Turner. Others such as Vermeer were virtually unknown until modern connoisseurs began to take an interest in their work.
Discoveries and rediscoveries are the art historian's ultimate high. Yet for every outstanding discovery, such as Georges de la Tour, there has been a galaxy of non-events. Nowadays second-rate artists are "rediscovered" and presented with a fanfare, simply because of their race or gender, which is given as the reason they suffered the neglect of white, male art historians for so long. Never mind the work itself, which is often dull, conventional fare.
I had this politically incorrect thought confirmed a few weeks ago at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington DC, with an exhibition by Lavinia Fontana, an artist from Renaissance Bologna. While Fontana came across as an exceptional person, her paintings were no more interesting than those by hundreds of other lesser-known Renaissance painters that crowd the walls and basements of Italian provincial museums. It was an exhibition with historical interest, but hardly an artistic revelation.
Revelations were to be had elsewhere in Washington that week, with one of the most eye-opening shows that will be held anywhere this year. Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, at the National Gallery of Art, has unveiled an artist who deserves to take his place as one of the great painters in what is arguably the greatest of all eras of Western painting.
Lotto (c 1480-1556/57) was slightly younger than Giorgione (b 1477/78-1510), and slightly older than Titian (1488/90-1576). He was born in Venice, and his career also overlapped the lives of Giovanni Bellini, Veronese, Bassano and Tintoretto, although he remains less well-known than any of these painters. He is thought to have studied with Alvise Vivarini, and probably Bellini, but there is no hard evidence. Unusually for a Venetian, he found his first success away from the city, in Treviso, where he was written about as a famous painter at the age of 25.
Throughout his life he kept returning to his native city, but spent long periods in Treviso and Bergamo in Lombardy; he also worked in Rome, and in the towns of the Italian Marches along the Adriatic coast. His travels seem to have been motivated by the search for lucrative commissions, but this nomadic lifestyle almost certainly diminished his chances of long-term success and contributed to his historical neglect. He receives scant attention in Vasari's Lives, which remains the main biographical source for most of the Renaissance masters.
When Lotto returned to live in Venice in 1425, in his 40s, he found it hard to compete with Titian, who had stayed in the city and prospered while his colleague was roaming the regions. The challenge seems to have inspired some of Lotto's most brilliant portraits and devotional images, but by 1533 he had left again for the Marches. Although he was in Venice again from 1540-42, and from 1545-49, he seems to have had, at best, a love-hate relationship with the city. In 1554, feeling miserable about his inability to earn a living as a painter, he became a lay brother in a religious order in Loreto, in the Marches, where he died three years later.
Lotto is an intriguing case, because we know so little about his early career, and so much about his later years, due to the discovery in the 1960s of an account book, the Libro di Spese Diverse, that the artist kept for the last 20 years of his life. Unwittingly, Lotto has left us the most comprehensive record of a Renaissance artist's everyday existence, including details of art materials, food and clothing, and how much it all cost. His account book and his letters also illuminate the relationships between Lotto and his patrons, allowing insights into the artist's personality.
Accordingly, many scholars seem to feel they are personally acquainted with the painter. By common agreement he was neurotic, hypersensitive and restless, but also possessed of tremendous pictorial intelligence and inventiveness. Lotto was exceptionally pious, but historians are still arguing over to what degree he was a devout Roman Catholic, and to what degree a free-thinker. The fact that he painted a small portrait of Martin Luther has caused unending speculation.
Lotto never married, and never produced the sensuous nudes that Titian and Giorgione made fashionable. Yet his religious paintings are filled with living beings who display psychologically convincing attitudes, not the usual blank stares. He is an artist with naturalistic tendencies, who always repays the closest attention, because the details in his paintings are drawn from the material culture in which he lived, and each detail is enlisted to help tell a story. Indeed, Lotto's love of symbolism and allegory was so compulsive that it is tempting to look for multiple meanings in every object or gesture, although many paintings probably say as much about his joie de vivre as they do about his penchant for gameplaying.
Across the centuries, one takes away a keen impression of Lotto's wit. His comic intentions are obvious when he paints a grinning Cupid placing a huge yoke around the shoulders of Marsilio Cassotti and his bride Faustina (1523), who stare solemnly out at the viewer. He is more deadpan when he portrays two noble brothers as shepherds attending the birth of Jesus, leaving their fine clothes visible beneath the loose-fitting, rustic robes.
Apparently Lotto did not believe religion should be portrayed as a solemn affair, and he filled his "sacred conversations" with familiar vignettes of human behaviour. In an early work, Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome, Peter, Clare, and Francis (c 1505), the Madonna holds out a hand, as if to restrain an unshaven St Francis, who points to the wound in his side, prefiguring the crucifixion. "Please, you'll frighten the baby!" she seems to be saying. The infant Jesus, however, is too busy examining a scroll held out by St Jerome, which bears the artist's signature.
In another altarpiece, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Catherine, Augustine, John the Baptist, Sebastian, and Anthony Abbot (1521), the youthful St John is all but strangling the lamb of God at the base of the picture, like a boisterous child grappling with the household pet. In the sky, the angels are fighting over a music book; while Anthony Abbot has been equipped with a pair of green socks that defy both fashion and symbolism. This time Lotto has signed his name on a trompe l'oeil piece of paper that curls out from under the carpet on which St John wrestles with the lamb. It is as though the artist slipped a calling card - or an invoice - into the composition at the last minute.
Lotto could never lose sight of the essential absurdity of the "sacred conversation" genre. In the atmosphere of humanism that flourished in the Renaissance, the idea of the Virgin and Child, standing around with assorted saints, as though posing for a family portrait, is a kind of theatrical convention. Coming out of the stiff, hieratic forms of Byzantine art, it was acceptable enough for the Madonna and the saints to be lined up like soldiers on parade. But as modelling of forms and perspective became more sophisticated, the gap between worldly observation and mystical significance became increasingly apparent. Lotto never seems to have accepted the conventions at face value. In his altarpieces, it is not unusual for the baby Jesus to be distracted by some detail - a flower, a scroll, a book or a ring - while the saints lavish their attentions on him. In one picture, the Child exchanges startled glances with a long-eared squirrel that St Catherine has brought along - for reasons that are still exercising the ingenuity of art historians.
In these pictures, the Virgin Mary often has a look of forebearance, as though she is enduring the visit of a group of boring relatives. While Lotto uses recognisable symbols, such as the small coffin the Child stands upon, in acknowledgement of his destiny, he imbues the figures with personalities in a way that is unmatched by other artists of the period. To contemporary eyes, he seems remarkably modern.
In a famous version of the Annunciation (c 1534-35), Lotto has the Virgin Mary turn away in fright from the angel who has materialised in her bedroom, and from God the Father, who is diving down from a cloud like Superman. Her cat flees in terror at the sudden, unsubtle invasion. The alarming nature of the event is emphasised by the fastidious care lavished on details of furniture - a treasure hunt for those seeking hidden symbols, and a clear indication of the degree to which Lotto admired the artists of the Northern Renaissance, who adopted similar techniques. The heavy, canopied bed in the background would not be out of place in a work by Van Eyck.
Another point at which Lotto seems peculiarly modern is his willingness to question the boundaries between reality and representation. He paints a large grasshopper at the base of a picture of St Jerome (c 1513-15), as though the insect were walking along the bottom of the frame. In another work, the same role is played by a pair of fruit-laden branches and the distinctive slip of paper bearing the artist's signature. He tries to draw the viewer into the world of the picture, suggesting that religion is an intrinsic part of life, not a fable to be contained within a frame.
Yet on one occasion, when it came to representing the unrepresentable, namely God the Father, Lotto was capable of extraordinary innovation. In a Trinity (1523-24), from Bergamo, he portrayed the Father as a ghostly white silhouette - a being of pure light. He drew a clear distinction between the ethereal, yellow light of the heavens, with its clouds and putti; and a crisp, beautifully painted pastoral landscape at the bottom of the picture. Jesus Himself is the link between heaven and earth; a fleshy, realistic figure suspended in the void - presumably, an accurate reflection of Lotto's own Christocentric beliefs.
Lotto's altarpieces establish the tenets of his special genius, but it was as a portraitist that he attained his greatest distinction. In particular, one thinks of the Portrait of a Lady as Lucretia (c 1533), in the National Gallery, London, in which a richly dressed Venetian woman points to a drawing of the Roman heroine who chose to take her own life rather than sacrifice her honour.
Then there is the portrait of the melancholy young man, from the Accademia in Venice (c 1530), who pores over a ledger book, on a table strewn with faded rose petals and a small lizard. Perhaps the most famous of all is Andrea Odoni (1527), from the Queen's collection, which shows a wealthy merchant and collector, surrounded by fragments of antique statuary. Each of these pictures is laden with symbolsthat have tantalised generations of schol-ars. Biographies are encrypted within the paintings, but the clues have grown ambiguous, leading to widely differing interpretations, and the danger of over-interpretation.
The Lady in the National Gallery portrait has been seen both as a noblewoman insisting on her marital fidelity, and as a courtesan who treats the "Lucretia" reference in an ironic manner. The young man from the Accademia is often assumed to have been unlucky in love and is now turning his attention solely to the world of business, abandoning the sporting and courtly pursuits suggested by the dead bird, the lute and hunting horn that hang on the wall behind. On the other hand, there is no reason why he might not combine interests in business, music and hunting. The rose petals and lizard need not signify melancholy, but simply a sense of mortality and a cold-blooded steadfastness of will.
With Andrea Odoni, scholars have been assisted by new details that emerged when the painting was cleaned, shortly before this exhibition. It is now apparent that Odoni is holding a small gold crucifix on a chain next to his heart. This suggests that, even though the merchant is surrounded by the relics of the pagan world, he is testifying to his heartfelt love of Christianity over everything else. The small effigy of the goddess Diana held in his extended right hand now projects the message: "Take this trinket, it means nothing to me. It is only Jesus that matters."
This is a more persuasive reading than any others that have been preferred, but Lotto's portraits are filled with hidden associations. In 1913 the scholar Caversazzi was able to identify the subject of a portrait of 1518, when he recognised the coat of arms of the Brembati family on a ring worn by a richly dressed woman. Written on the moon, seen over her right shoulder, are the tiny letters "CI". By putting these letters within the word for moon, "luna", he deduced that the woman's name was Lucina. While there is virtually no disagreement that the subject is the Lombard noblewoman, Lucina Brembati, every other detail has been hotly disputed, including the sitter's hypothetical pregnancy, which is suggested by an ingenious reading of symbols.
Although the puzzles in Lotto's work hold our attention, it is the artist's sense of colour, his compositional skill and his ability to paint exquisite surfaces and fabrics that make the most immediate impact. His portraits are strikingly life-like, with one of the very simplest, a Portrait of a Young Man with a Lamp (1513), in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, being among the most haunting. The young man's troubled expression has been hardly less of a mystery to art historians than the Mona Lisa's smile. It may be because the painting is reproduced onthe cover of the guidebook to one of Europe's greatest collections that it was not made available for the retrospective.
This is, in fact, the fourth time Lotto has been "rediscovered" in a little more than a hundred years.
Bernard Berenson started the process with a groundbreaking monograph of 1895, which used the little-known artist to make a case for the methods of connoisseurship in establishing a painter's oeuvre and significance. The second occasion was an exhibition of 108 paintings held in Venice in 1953, which stimulated a number of new studies, including a revised edition of Berenson's book, even though the famous taste-maker was now in his 90s. Finally came the exhibitions and conferences of 1980-81 in Treviso, Bergamo and the Marches, which celebrated the 500th anniversary of Lotto's birth.
Although the artist's bibliography is now voluminous, this is the first time his work has secured a full-scale exhibition in the United States. The responses have been so universally positive that - with Bergamo and Paris to follow - it seems this most underestimated of Renaissance masters is about to move, once and for all, from obscurity into the light.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald