hellovenezia

The places painted by Lorenzo Lotto, a great Renaissance artist only recognised as such last century, and entirely to be rediscovered, step by step.

The Accademia Gallery, the Church of the Carmini, the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Church of San Giacomo dell’Orio.

The artistic tradition is so deep-rooted in Venice, so widespread and comes so naturally that little boys may often be seen playing football using the posts of the gates carved on tombs of doges as goals, as happens, for example, in Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, or riding the pair of lions sculpted in red Verona marble by Giovanni Bonazza in 1722 as if they were rocking horses in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini off St. Mark’s Square.
This frivolous remark is our starting point for a journey that will enable us to discover a great sixteenth century artist, mistreated during his life in the city of his birth and so strongly contested that he was only rediscovered last century thanks to Bernard Berenson, the famous and thoroughly forthright American art historian.
Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice in 1480: the exact place is not known. He was very probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, known as Giambellino (born in Venice in 1430) or Alvise Vivarini of Murano (born in 1446).

Whatever the truth of it was, Lorenzo Lotto spent his childhood and adolescence in Venice, but his debut as a painter twenty years later took place in the provinces, in Treviso.
He started his career as a portrait painter, some features of his works being closely related to Antonello da Messina, Giambellino’s partner, who arrived in Venice midway through the 1470s, although he also executed a sacred work, the Sacra Conversazione, in 1505 for the Church of Santa Cristina al Tiveron, a district of Quinto, near Treviso.

He was a mainly a portrait painter, therefore, and a very great one, but with many official commissions that involved him in a kind of perennial apprenticeship outside the capital of the Most Serene Republic, so that he suffered actual financial hardship and certainly had difficulty in planning his future, probably to the detriment of the decisions he took and the success of his painting work as a whole.
Lotto was sensitive to the influence of the great sixteenth century artists, whom he drew on both in constructing his composition schemes and in the use of colour, which was “Nordic”, or nearer Bellini’s productions, if not those of Giorgione, typically Venetian.
In any case, true to the saying in the Gospel, Lorenzo was not a “prophet in his own country” in Venice; he only painted three altarpieces (which we will be going on to seek out), all very disputed, if not even scoffed at, by the cultural operators of the time such as Ludovico Dolce, the biographer of mighty Titian. And indeed it was Titian himself, ten years younger and with an eye to marketing (whatever it was called then) that was to find him clients and a studio but was one of Lotto’s main opponents, to the point of calling in Pietro Aretino against him in 1548: Aretino wrote a very hostile letter claiming Titian’s superiority as an artist in a tone that was almost threatening.
We shall start our tour at the Accademia Galleries (Accademia waterbus stop), where we will see the famous Portrait of a Young Man, or The Young Invalid, painted in 1527.
The painting, a wasted young man turning three-quarters towards us while he leafs through a heavy book lying on a table, contains a wide range of allegorical symbols associated with fleeting human events in the affairs of this earth, including rose petals, the lizard on the table to the right, the background with a lute and a horn that perhaps stand for renunciation of vanities in the pursuit of knowledge and the book on the table that our young man is looking through.

This portrait is very well known indeed in art history, painted by Lotto in his full maturity and giving an idea of the genre that the artist chose. He uncompromisingly follows the Lombard school, above all the Brescians, with whom he had come into contact in Bergamo, where he lived for thirteen years, both in terms of choice of subject and because he suppressed the slightest hint of courtly painting, concentrating on intellectualistic and intimistic thought.
From the Accademia Galleries we move on to look for the three altarpieces in the city. We shall be zig-zagging because we must follow the chronology of the works.
Lotto had enemies in the city and was forced to move to Treviso, then Rome and finally to Bergamo for a long period of time. He returned to Venice in 1525, but went on executing commissions for clients in the provinces, and only tackled his first public work in 1529, the St. Nicholas of Bari in Glory between St. John the Baptist, Saint Lucia and Angels for the Church of the Carmini, which stands a few minutes’ walk from the Accademia Galleries. Seen from the eyes of a modern spectator, the use of colour, the melancholy of the subjects’ faces and the daring perspective of the landscape and of the saint in flight make a touchingly beautiful painting.
Ludovico Dolce, Titian’s “manager” took a completely different view, however, savaging both its structure and its use of colour, to the point of holding this altarpiece up as an example of bad art (this would be called comparative advertising in our own day). Thirteen years were to pass before Lorenzo Lotto was able to consider painting another Venetian altarpiece. This he did for the Dominican friars of the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (from Carmini, go to the Cà Rezzonico waterbus stop, take service 1 to Rialto and then a ten minutes’ walk), for whom he executed The Alms of Saint Anthony.

This is how art historian Gian Carlo Argan describes this work:
“The debt to Carpaccio is obvious …Lotto, with his horror of rhetoric, counters the overwhelming pomp of Titian’s glories with the ostentatiously bourgeois image of bureaucracy in the dispensation of favours: the saint is scrupulously reading the supplications collected by an acolyte, listens to the views of the angels that whisper into his ears and gives the appropriate instructions to another assistant at the cash desk.
“Faith and Providence, therefore, are not transcendent entities but things of this world, social realities: and this … is an aspect of modernity that Titian, the last of the great Humanists, would never have conceived. It is a modernity that is transformed into a surprising pictorial innovation with the poor crowding together right in the foreground … in an area that belongs partly to the space occupied by the painting and partly to the space of the spectator, who thus feels as if he is caught up in the crush of imploring worshippers. For the first time, instead of a choir commenting on the action, we have a crowd that takes part in it.”
This time we only have to wait another four years for Lotto’s third and last work in Venice, the altarpiece of the Madonna and Four Saints for the Church of San Giacomo dell’Orio. The painter was 66 years old and suffering from a number of ailments; in fact, he decided to make his will in that year, admitting that he had very little of his own and that he would not be able to leave a fortune to his heirs. These difficulties are to be seen in this painting: it is rather small and the pictorial structure is so bare as to be evanescent and ominously gloomy.
When we have seen this painting, we come out into Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio and this is the time for a few minutes of rest and reflection before going back (there is a choice of the San Stae or Riva di Biasio waterbus stops, both served by the No. 1 waterbus and both near the square).

Alessandro Rizzardini (riproduzione riservata ©)