Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance - Review

novel Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 272 pp; 80 color ills., 100 b/w $5500

The Lorenzo Lotto exhibition that lay 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 contrary among Renaissance scholars he has for more [i]or[/i] less time been appreciated as single 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 part of scholarship. The latest wave of book-length publications, below review here, brings together many novel findings and offers a newly integrated picture of the artist's work. Jacques Bonnet's work is the first monograph upon the artist to appear in French and the monograph by means 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 hold a more central place in Renaissance art than he has hitherto been granted." individual of course sympathizes with the sentiment, and however it is worth wondering whether a central position is suited to an artist who wearied 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 means 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 part of scholarship is any indication it might evince the best means of asking what link togethers these artistic matters to the critical religious climate of early 16th-century Italy.

The catalogue, written by means of David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs in the best tradition of new catalogues, offering a substantial essay upon each work rather than the traditional small and all-too-often unsatisfying access The volume also includes essays through several respected scholars in the field upon important aspects of Lotto's work, and single 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 singles 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 concerns 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 access 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 on the outside evidence of Lotto's awareness of Michelangelo and Raphael, especially in the Roman works (evidence postscripted in David Alan Brown's superior entry on the Castel Sant'Angelo Saint Jerome cat. no. 8) to make the important point that Lotto's avoidance of these designs and their "formidable pride in the human figure" was a deliberate choice - a choice, single might add, for which the Recanati Transfiguration can stand as a manifesto. Perhaps this explains wherefore Lotto seems consistently to have rest stronger inspiration in artists at more [i]or[/i] less remove from the principal High Renaissance masters and, as it were, individual 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. solitary 20 out of 116 documented works of all stamps she shows, were made for artisans. Among his altarpieces, of which alone 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 disputes the notion that Lotto's patrons living in smaller cities and towns were necessarily les sophisticated than those in larger cities, on the contrary has space to mention alone a few of the more illustrious names, of that kind 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 dab 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. from one extremity to the other of 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 render free of access Matthew also stops short of addressing the lower part of the theories she disproves, which lies of course in the unusual qualities of many of Lotto's paintings. She be subsequent tos 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 stir from matters of production to matters of reception.