Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a man, probably 1540s, black chalk, 250 x 186 mm. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi
As you may remember I was involved in organising an exhibition on the portraits of renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto back in 2018-19 with my colleagues Miguel Falomír and Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo. It was shown at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London. An international conference was held at the Prado in 2018 and I presented there a paper on Lotto’s drawings. It has now been published by the Prado as part of the conference proceedings.
I’m thrilled to see it in print, even if I’m even less certain of the observations I make in it than I was when I was writing it. Very few sheets from Lotto’s hand survive, even if he must have been a prolific draughtsman — and clearly was a great one — so it is extremely hard to establish a reliable corpus of drawings securely attributable to him. Uncertainty has been a constant in scholarship on the subject and my article is no exception. Still, I hope it will prove useful, if nothing else as a summary of where we are on the subject, and also as a case study in the challenges and usefulness of connoisseurship. Do check it out.
One of Lorenzo Lotto’s greatest altarpieces can be found in the small church of Santa Maria della Pietà in the town of Monte San Giusto in the Marche. Painted in 1528-29, it is a stunningly ambitious representation of the Crucifixion, conceived by a master at the height of his powers, but also an artist who was increasingly struggling to find work in his native Venice leading him to seek employment elsewehere, especially in the Marche where many of the greatest of his later works can still be seen today.
The Lorenzo Lotto Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery, which I co-organised with Miguel Falomir and Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, is now in the last days of its run. It’s been a great season for Lotto, what with us putting Lotto on at two of the major art museums of the world, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and The National Gallery, and with the concurrent Lotto initiative, inspired in part by our exhibition, in the region of the Marche, which has included an additional, more specialist-oriented exhibition in Macerata as well as the introduction of a joint ticket for visitors wanting to go on the Lotto trail through the region. Something which I’ve done and highly recommend — not only does it feature some of the artist’s greatest altarpieces and other paintings, the Marche is also a beautiful part of the world, mercifully free of tourists. Now, with tours, academic conferences, study days and other activities behind me, I can only say that I’ve become even more devoted learning about to this astonishing artist. I hope you have too.
Encouragingly in that regard, the London iteration of the exhibition, smaller but arguably more focused than the magnificent Madrid one, has been a success. It is heartening to see so many people show an interest in a great artist who is virtually unknown outside Italy. I attribute it to Lotto’s very direct, intimate and relatable approach to his subject matter — he is an artist of great empathy who cannot but invest a lot of himself in his work, and it shows. If you haven’t seen the show yet and are in London, I hope you might be able to find the time. It’s open till Sunday. Check my introduction to the show above.
For the past couple of years I’ve been working with Miguel Falomír, director of the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and Professor Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo of the University of Verona, to bring you this exquisite exhibition of one of the greatest portraitists of the Western tradition, Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1557). It gives me great pleasure finally to see it open in Madrid tomorrow, where it will remain till 30 September before travelling to London for a more concise showing between 5 November and 10 February. It includes a large, varied selection of his portraits as well as a number of objects of the kind he depicted with such care in them — jewellery, books, sculptures, clothing, carpets… — for what I hope will function as an extension of portraiture and our understanding of it into so-called material culture.
Lotto is one of the great idiosyncratic artists of the Renaissance, painting like nobody else. His religious paintings are full of energy, humour, and a striking down-to-earth pathos, as are his portraits which are amongst the most varied and empathetic of the period. Itinerant for most of his life, he found the greatest success in his early career in Treviso in the first decade and especially Bergamo in the second, though he continued to produce fascinating, personal work through his late, depressed years.
Rarely able to attract the kind of elite clientele that was available to his great contemporary Titian, he distinguished himself for posterity by painting mostly the emerging bourgeoisie, the demographic that would increasingly dominate European politics, economy and culture down to the present day. His portraits seem remarkably frank, warts-and-all without being ostentatious about it, and as mentioned deeply empathetic. His sitters always invariably appear interesting to us, as if the artist is bringing forward their unique qualities for us to contemplate, not just on their behalf but on the behalf of humanity.
Conceived by Miguel and consolidated by Enrico, who is one of the premier Lotto specialists working today, the exhibition is one to which I’ve contributed mostly as a junior partner, but I am proud of the results, also of my own labour on it. The Prado has produced the catalogue, which we hope will stand as a significant contribution to Lotto scholarship, as well as an easy to access introduction to his activities as a portraitist and the historical and social context within which he worked. I’ve contributed the entries on the portrait drawings and the National Gallery’s three Lotto portraits, among other things. Do seek it out if you’re interested, and most importantly go see the exhibition. Please note that the exhibition is significantly larger at the Prado, which is definitely the place to see it for completists and specialists, while it will be more select, but hopefully no less beautiful and poignant at the National Gallery.
Raphael’s Portrait of Lorenzo de’Medici
The Metabunker summarizes the problems of attribution surrounding the Raphael portrait sold at Christie’s in 2007
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On the Drawings of Lorenzo Lotto
Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a man, probably 1540s, black chalk, 250 x 186 mm. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi
As you may remember I was involved in organising an exhibition on the portraits of renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto back in 2018-19 with my colleagues Miguel Falomír and Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo. It was shown at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London. An international conference was held at the Prado in 2018 and I presented there a paper on Lotto’s drawings. It has now been published by the Prado as part of the conference proceedings.
I’m thrilled to see it in print, even if I’m even less certain of the observations I make in it than I was when I was writing it. Very few sheets from Lotto’s hand survive, even if he must have been a prolific draughtsman — and clearly was a great one — so it is extremely hard to establish a reliable corpus of drawings securely attributable to him. Uncertainty has been a constant in scholarship on the subject and my article is no exception. Still, I hope it will prove useful, if nothing else as a summary of where we are on the subject, and also as a case study in the challenges and usefulness of connoisseurship. Do check it out.