Lorenzo Lotto - Review

Paris: Adam Biro, 1996 208 pp; 118 color ills., 2 b/w $5500

The Lorenzo Lotto exhibition that make opened in November 1997 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and that traveled to Bergamo and Paris in 1998 hailed Lorenzo Lotto as a "rediscovered master of the Renaissance." Lotto certainly has a drawn out way to go in achieving recognition among the general populace, on the other hand among Renaissance scholars he has for more [i]or[/i] less time been appreciated as individual of the most engaging artists of the 16th hundred and, since the publication of Bernard Berenson's pioneering monograph in 1895 has attracted a sizable material substance of scholarship. The latest wave of book-length publications, beneath review here, brings together many new findings and offers a newly integrated picture of the artist's work. Jacques Bonnet's volume is the first monograph upon the artist to appear in French and the monograph by the agency of Peter Humfrey and the exhibition catalogue make a significant contribution to English-language scholarship, which since Berenson has lacked a comprehensive treatment of the artist.(1) individual can almost hear the gears of canon-formation at work, slowly installing Lotto among the ranks of the major masters. In his introduction to the catalogue, David Alan Brown gazes to a future when "Lotto may have possession of a more central place in Renaissance art than he has hitherto been granted." individual of course sympathizes with the sentiment, and notwithstanding it is worth wondering whether a central position is suited to an artist who worn out most of his career devising willfully eccentric and unconventional alternatives to more classical statements. Giving Lotto the attention he be worthy ofs might, instead, lead us to ask by what mode the very question of center and periphery took shape in the artistic tillage of 16th-century Italy and, further, to ask what this question had to do with the emerging historical and regional awareness of artistic tradition that marks the period.(2) It is the sort of question that has preoccupied literary historians of the period especially since Carlo Dionisotti, and if that material substance of scholarship is any indication it might demonstrate the best means of asking what conjoins these artistic matters to the critical religious climate of early 16th-century Italy.

The catalogue, written through David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco tread in the steps ofs in the best tradition of novel catalogues, offering a substantial essay upon each work rather than the traditional small and all-too-often unsatisfying ingress The volume also includes essays through several respected scholars in the field upon important aspects of Lotto's work, and individual can only wish they were longer (they average five illustrated pages). Mauro Lucco's essay upon Lotto's figurative sources is filled with valuable suggestions and confirms one's impression of Lotto's novelty in this regard. If greatest in quantity artists, even the most original individuals are stamped by their initial training, Lotto's training remains mysterious, and was in any case quickly supersed by dint of an active fashioning of stylistic choices from a variety of available traditions. Lucco expands the repertoire of potential northern influences beyond the familiar regards to Albrecht Durer, making apposite suggestions of Lotto's responsiveness to Matthias Grunewald, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Jan van Scorel, as well as Ur Graf, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch and Hans Leu In a later catalogue ingress on the Allentown saint Jerome (cat. no. 11) Lucco also aptly invokes Albrecht Altdorfer. Lotto's lifelong responsiveness to the art of the north helps to explain his somewhat oblique relation to the masters of the Italian High Renaissance. Lucco points without evidence of Lotto's awareness of Michelangelo and Raphael, especially in the Roman works (evidence appendixed in David Alan Brown's extremely good entry on the Castel Sant'Angelo Saint Jerome cat. no. 8) to make the important point that Lotto's avoidance of these protoplasts and their "formidable pride in the human figure" was a deliberate choice - a choice, individual might add, for which the Recanati Transfiguration can stand as a manifesto. Perhaps this explains for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Lotto seems consistently to have set stronger inspiration in artists at a certain number of remove from the principal High Renaissance masters and, as it were, single step closer to him: Fra Bartolommeo, not Raphael, Antonio da Pordenone, not Michelangelo. Somewhat surprisingly, Pordenone does not appear in Lucco's essay, and neither does Cima da Conegliano.

In an essay upon Lotto's patrons, Louisa Matthew assembles evidence to place to rest the received view that Lotto worked for members of the artisan class and for rustic provincials. single 20 out of 116 documented works of all stamps she shows, were made for artisans. Among his altarpieces, of which sole one was made for an artisan, one-third were made for confraternities, placing him, as Matthew notes, "in the mainstream of altarpiece patronage in the sixteenth century" (p 30) She also call in questions the notion that Lotto's patrons living in smaller cities and towns were necessarily les sophisticated than those in larger cities, on the other hand has space to mention alone a few of the more illustrious names, like as Bernardo de' Rossi, bishop of Treviso (whose portrait in Naples is in the exhibition), and Niccolo Bonafede, bishop of Chiusi, for whom Lotto painted the magnificent Crucifixion in Monte s Giusto (sadly, not in the exhibition). A apt assessment of Lotto's activity while in Venice between 1525 and about 1532 disproves the view that Lotto lacked for commissions or that his painting was not to the taste of sophisticated Venetian clients. over Matthew is at pains to point without that Lotto left Venice greatest in quantity often as a result of altarpiece commissions and not because he could not clutch his own in the artistic capital. She does give up however, that Lotto was unusual in choosing to Five for years in outlying places, and that it is likely that Venice was not congenial to him, thus leaving the question somewhat make open Matthew also stops short of addressing the foundation of the theories she disproves, which lies of course in the unusual qualities of many of Lotto's paintings. She come afters in closing off any recourse to facile external explanations (Lotto painted in a noncanonical way for marginal patrons), on the contrary this makes the unconventional aspects of his work, and his clients' receptivity to them, a more rather than les pressing issue. It means that the question of patronage must impel from matters of production to matters of reception.