Curator's introduction | Lorenzo Lotto Portraits | National Gallery

hello and welcome to the National Gallery my name is Matthias Revell I am the curator of 16th century Italian paintings here at the gallery and the co-creator of Lorenzo lotto portraits I would also like to welcome our visitors for virtual visitors watching on the livestream thanks for tuning in this talk will be an overview of lattos career seen through the perspective of his portraits but before I start I was just I just want to thank my co curators for this show as you may know it is a collaboration with the Museo del Prado in Madrid and was previously there the idea came from Miguel Amir who is now the director of the Prado and the intellectual backbone in many ways of the exhibition was in local media that put solo from the University of Verona he's one of our foremost Lotto specialists and is working on a catalogue raisonné so it's very much an effort between the three of us Oh I don't know what that little yellow thing down there is that's not intentional anyway Lotso is it's a bit hard to get to grips with he's because he's an artist who moves around so much and it's so distinct as an artist that he doesn't really belong to a specific school of a specific group of artists and that's a challenge for anybody who studies his work and I will try to ameliorate it a bit by having these maps occasionally through the talk with highlights on the places that that are important for this part of the talk you see it was actually meant to be not these these rectangles but just highlights I don't know what's happened but anyway I should say this is this is a portrait of lotto from Calvary Dolphy's 1648 biography of the artist in medieval art say we don't know whether this actually is based on a pathetic likeness but it's the closest we get we assume that law that Rodolfo Ridolfi was was relying on something that was known to be a portrait of lotto but we don't know the picture and we don't know really there are various ideas as to other portraits or self-portraits by him but we don't really know what he looked like this is the closest we get lot so is a Venetian artist from initially and in a way primarily even though it doesn't quite explain him he is born in Venice around 50 1480 1481 and clearly trains there as an artist in Venice he learns he learns the practice of the Venetian practice of oil painting the sophisticated layering of oil to create depth and and richness of color from his his teacher and from other people in other artists in Venice we think his teacher is Alvey Sevilla vorenii who is one of the great artists menace at this time and runs like a dynastic family workshop there it would seem from studying Lotto style that that his style that he that he studied with him but we don't actually we don't have any documentation one thing that does influenced and very strongly at the beginning of his career and indeed any Venetian artist of the time almost is the example of Antonella damascena the Chilean artist who in the 14 70s spent some crucial years in Venice and and ushered in an approach a sort of the luminous poetic approach to painting and to oil painting not least in portraiture and that's the the juxtaposition I'm doing I'm showing you here is it's a way of illustrating that the painting on the right is the first exhibition you know a first painting you see as you enter it the exhibition and it is I think quite an unforgettable image very powerful this is a strange looking man with big jaw and these piercing bluish green eyes meeting you it looks really like nothing else in lotto server and it's actually an uncertain attribution it's just difficult to see who else did it at this time it's clearly indebted to to Antonello this kind of very strong car score that you have and the Venetian style of portraiture where you have a frontal opposed sitter on fairly flat plain background with a parapet in front it's very 15th century style and the clothes you see it's the clothing of a Venetian gentleman and in the latter 15th century the reason we think it's lotto is because of the it has to it has this very lyrical aspect to it which you don't really find in his other art it's it's sort of reminds you a little bit of Johanna who was still very young at this point and who becomes a very important artist in the in the first decade of the 16th century who has this lyrical mysterious approach to both portraiture and and narrative painting there's some of that but there are still more of a physical presence here than is usual with painters at this time the attention to detail in the hair and the curls of the hair and so on and their various other sort of circumstantial reasons for believing that it actually is painted by Lotto that I won't go into here in any case it's a beautiful image and I encourage you to think about how it might relate to to everything else in the exhibition because lots of stale style does change a lot he is this this painting would be late 1490s around 1500 probably a bit earlier actually and probably painted in Treviso where we know lotto was working as an independent mast on 1503 and there's a there's documentation of master lorenzo painter in 1498 in Treviso so Theresa is just north of Venice as part of the Venetian dominion I can go back to the so the map here and it's on the trade route through the Dolomites and the Alps with Germany so it's it's it's a there's a strong German presence German merchants but also a colony of German artists documented in Treviso at this time and it's definitely something that that influences lotto which I'll get to in a minute in the meantime I'll just point to another important Venetian influence on the right you have lattos first great altarpiece painted in Treviso in santa cristina the church of santa cristina and you see how the model is very close indeed to Giovanni Bellinis late masterpiece the send zachariah altarpiece in Venice the model is the same that the way you have an architectural surround that continues into the virtually into the into the physical space of the viewer who we'll be looking at here you can even see it with the here's the the physical architectural frame of the of the painting and it continues over here into into the into the painting you see that the types of Saints around the Virgin and Child very similar in in conception the rendering however is different and this is where the Germanic influence comes in where Bellini at this time potentially influenced or at least sensing what we're painting is going he it's it's related to what George Oni is also doing at this time but I think a scaly Bellini is influencing George Oni rather than yob all the way around is often said that Bellini is picking up on Giorgione but I think actually Bellini is can is coming up with some of this himself it's a soft focus atmospheric rendering both of landscape and and and and the figures you get this the sense of the the warmth of the Sun and the the warmth of the of the the tiles were the bare that bare feet and the tiles and so on he creates this perfect moment for contemplation from the viewer by by offering a beautiful summer day and this is something that he does better than anybody and this is more hard-edged what lotto is doing it's it's it's the same type of types of figures but it's it's crisper and and and harder in an in shape it doesn't quite have that softness and that is because of the German influence that I was talking about I think it's it's something that lots of internalizes in his early years and it really stays with him throughout his career we see him we see here at an early devotional picture about on 1506 that and then a similar formatted picture by Albrecht Durer who famously comes to Venice in 1505 and paints a very important altarpiece the Madonna the roast Garland's which is not in Prague and influences every everybody looks at it they flock around this painting and indeed anything he does is a great example for for Venetian artists at this time lotto is in Treviso he might have met dura but he's already keyed into this this German style this this this more exacting one might say objective naturalistic style where you try really closely to depict what you see and maybe even exaggerated a bit you see in endurance it's almost caricature all in in places and it's very German approach to things like slight overtones of the grotesque and maybe the ugly and you see that also here I think in the way lots of us painting is Saints here Lotso is not somebody who is particularly interested in the grotesque but he does he does integrate this objectivism or whatever you want to call it it's not really a good word but this this approach to to what he sees and the rendering of detail into his art and you see that already in his in his portraiture in Treviso such as the bishop bernardo de Rossi very important early portrait by lotto you see that he similarly to the first picture we saw behind the first portrait we saw by him is posed more less frontally I mean he is turning his head but quite flatly against against a uniform background is very Venetian arrangement however he's rendered literally warts and all you see the Watson is done and on his cheeks here and on his forehead his face is really naturalistic and there's a real force in the way he looks at us much different from from the the young man we've had that wistful dreamy Georgian ask maybe poetic tenor this is serious confrontation with a sitter in a way intimate but and certainly he's very present and this is something lots of Excel said oh and then you have the rendering of details his signet ring the little scroll he has here but now that the rossi was an important ecclesiastical but also a political figure in in Treviso he was the bishop of the of the city he was hated by certain political factions in in fact there is this theory that this scroll pertains to a court case he successfully pursued against political rivals who'd recently had had tried to have him assassinated and he'd survived that and then pursued a court case against him afterwards and this is pretty shortly before this painting was was made he was a patron of lotos he surrounded himself with poets painters humanists of all stripes humanism is the study of all all knowledge that's not directly emerges from the the church and from religion so the the attentions of classical antiquity to classical poetry and the whole new literature and art that's that's coming coming up and in science indeed I mean it's it's all of these things and and it's this new knowledge is becoming and a force to be reckoned with in the in the class of people that Lotto surrounds them with or latera attaches himself to in Treviso so and a really good illustration of that is it's this painting on the Left which is the cover of that of the portrait most portraits if they were not official or semi official state portraits that would be seen in public were quite private objects slightly analogous to two family photos that we keep in albums today or indeed on our hard drives more increasingly and can't find anymore and so on but private objects that you show to to people in a more intimate way friends family members and so on and that's the same here and therefore most portraits were covered up in some way often with a cover a painted cover sometimes we don't know a whole lot about these covers because so few of them survived but we know that they were never used for most portraits but from some inventories and and and so on and this we know belonged to that and we have indeed the the same escutcheon the family arms of they're also here and here so what's going on here this is like to complicate a very intellectual image but the basic message is clear it's a shock supposition of something bad and something good vice and virtue on the right we have a satyr embodying the beast yield animal nature of man drunk clearly looking into this this you're for probably for wine or something spilling milk literally into the grass and also wine over here behind him is a ship that sinks in a storm and the tree that separates the composition is blighted and dead on the right side on the left side there's a new shoot a fresh shoot and here's a small child a little boy nude clambering around in the dirt looking and finding different objects here objects of music the musical instruments books and objects for measuring things and he picks up a compass he embodies the searching human soul the dawning of enlightenment of the human soul the compass that he picks up is of course used for geometry and geometrical calculation and it is an object that is associated with discovering the order of the universe of the cosmos as of nature and so on and then in the back on the other side of these sharp forbidding rocks we see if a verdant green mountain but the little boy probably the same boy but now has sprouted wings all over his body and it's ascending into this cloud covered mountains huh from which light emerges and that's the light of enlightenment this pertains directly to a contemporary treatise on the appetites of the human soul that was written by an associate of the Rosses and so it's an illustration of theory of theory and from a from a treatise at this time it's a virtual algorithm and vice but it's it's a very specific one and very intellectual something that only associates of Taurasi would even understand but this is the kind of thing he wanted to be associated with this is what he aspires to Wars and that's often the role of these covers if they're if they're decorated they illustrate the aspirations or or I'd like somehow the identity of the sitter or what the sitter wants to be thought of how he wants to be thought of so one last thing about this it's very precisely painted as you can see that the little buttons are lined up like peas in a pod here the the drapery folds are very precise very quite angular everything's extremely neat and done with sort of crystalline precision and then beautifully there's a sliver of blue sky up here at the top which you'd be forgiven for not noticing in the exhibition because it has a frame this picture and it's impossible to light it so see that blue bit it's in shadow but you can look for it then he paints an important painting in us a solo which is also part of the venetian dominion and up just like these drone shots that we have so I'm going to show you those to you you see there this is the the town of a solo sat on the top of a hill and it's in this picture this this is the this is the first thing you see as you come into the first room of the exhibition it's an altarpiece we don't know the exact circumstances of its commission but is painted with this great level of precision that I was talking about not least in the in the botanical detail of all these plants and then there's a great landscape with with as I said a soul appearing as the city on a hill like you like the heavenly Jerusalem here and then the Dolomites in the background the landscape surrounding a slope like we just saw a little bit off and typical alpine buildings of Italian style at this time that landscape owes something to Bellini but also to dura and other German artists and their landscape studies from the Alps interestingly here it's very sort of fam familiar subject it's it's the Virgin surrounded by two saints that are important to the Commission however if you look at the Virgin she looks kind of unusual she usually presented as a young and beautiful here we have a middle-aged woman and it's almost as if these angels are struggling to keep her lost you know one of them is holding his arm is sort of kind of thing lots of loss there's a lot of humor in his painting and they're very concrete these little babies that are that are helping her hover up there she is painted on the back like there's heavenly light emerging for this cloud cover that she's painting on top of it is the Virgin in glory maybe the the resurrected Virgin of the Assumption although we don't have her we don't have her tomb here which you usually have in the assumption or it's the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception which I think it's probably more likely the Immaculate Conception was the whole question of whether how the Virgin could be without sin if she was born of human parents like crisis without sin because he's divine but she was born of human parents and yet is without sin and it's a very difficult and controversial doctrine in the church that has very various proposals as to how it's possible and it's illustrated by a hovering Virgin often on a crescent moon you see that especially later but I think that's although the crescent moon is not there that's what's going on here but why is she middle aged she looks like this woman it's because it's a portrait and that's why it's in the exhibition that's why we have this altarpiece in the exhibition because believe it's a portrait it's not just a random type but actually this woman Katarina canaro who was a noble woman who had been deposed as Queen of Cyprus by the Venetian government Venice had Dominion in a year in its rain and also of a Cyprus at this point and she was given rain of a solo the region around a solo as well and also surround herself with Sciences humanists poets and painters and so on and new the Rossi and lots of may indeed of godness commission through the rossi and we think it's a very similar physiognomies so it's probably her she thought she'd also built a myth around herself that about her immaculate see she lived in celibacy and was and identified with the virgin of the Immaculate Conception so it makes sense in that context that you would show herself as the virgin even though it seems presumptuous to us to us today and indeed would later in the century that would be completely unheard us that anybody would show themselves as a virgin but this is a progressive time in in in Italy in terms of ideas in terms of theology and so on and these kinds of things happen at this time then Lata gets an invitation to come to recognize e in the region of the Maquis he his famous spreading he's depicted and described in a in a document of the time as pictur celebramos which means very famous painter so he's clearly recognized as a major talent and an emerging talent and there's demand for him he comes to recognize any plane says his breakthrough work his international so to speak outside venator breakthrough work which is this fantastic Pullip sake which is still in recogniz in the masucci Vico it's a it's a tour de force and in precision in detail in clarity and indeed an emotional engagement she'll surely in a minute i'll just want to just believe briefly mention the death that it shows to a visa be very nini his putative master you see that's the same kind of hard edged clarity of form i think in the two and obviously the the architecture and so on it's quite similar to something that libertine you would do so this is in part why we believe he was this master here you have you haven't I just have one detail of how it just how beautifully the attention he pays to objects and to clothing and drapery and books all these things like absolutely exquisitely painted a very disciplined and this is the Chi masa which is the top part of the altarpiece it's a debt crisis ported by an angel with the Magdalene and the Virgin here and then Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus behind him and it's I think what this tells us is about lattos emotional engagements a intensely emotional picture and really in any all of his work you feel this emotional engagement he's very emotionally available as an artist and is present in his painting is his own emotion is present there very much and I think this helps us understand it and then his graphic sensibility the way that the interplay of hands here of different hues the different hues of skin with Christ's palette palette flesh here the pale skin of the Magdalene and then the more sunburned of the male figure behind and the greens the reds the attention to two fabrics here it's it's it's just so it it's painted with such a sense of design that it's it's really quite remarkable and it's something that very interesting Lee changes changes quite a lot in the years to come because lotto is called to Rome I don't have a wonderful video of Rome so you have to do with this image but in Rome he is probably maybe through the rasa we don't know but he comes to Rome and he and he very quickly ends up working for Julius a second to the Pope the patron of Brahmins and Michelangelo and Raphael and he works indeed with Rafa in the stanza della signora in the papal apartments Raffles most famous work but of course has to the School of Athens here we don't know exactly what he does there he paints something in there it may have all been painted over lost and painted over by Raphael in the studio or it may still be there there's some theory that he painted the Justinian's delivering the pan decks which is on the left of the jurisprudence walls you can see how it's differently painted from that and that which is travel and so neck well there's almost entirely where I file very beautifully painted by Rafael this is a more layered approach to fresco painting which is not as integrated and as nuanced as this and there's some theory that this is lots of executing a design well I don't want to get into it it's a very complicated issue and it's highly controversial but it's possible we don't know how long he remains in Rome for but it profoundly affects it he his file changes completely and you can see that in this painting which is painted in 1511 for Rekha not see it's still in the Museo cubical right next to this which is very helpful if you visit recogniz which I would recommend because you can see this is before Rome and this is after room it's so different it's the the the the discipline and the precision of this has given way to disordered discombobulated strangely unsettled more monumental approach to figure to to a composition of course influenced by Rafa but also probably other artists it's it's a totally different he just cannot go back after having seen what is happening in Rome and having worked very close to rifle he changes his style and there's discussion among scholars whether this it was actually stifling to him to be working with Rafa land and that he had to leave Rome because he couldn't keep up with level of competition there and then Raphael and Michelangelo next door on the Sistine Chapel he was painting the ceiling at that time or whether it actually liberate something in lots of it liberate him and takes him away from this which is essentially a 15th century model that he's even though he's updating it to the new century it's still a 15th century where this is very much high Renaissance 16th century dynamism and an animation and so on very bizarre painting and there is something odd about loss as we as you may have gathered already with looking to a solo altarpiece and so on lots of next moves to bear the ball here and and he stays there for about a decade he's initially attracted there to paint and altarpiece it's it's it's on the on the on the edge of the Venetian dominion and I'll have some shots of it here for you bear Cabo is an important trade center on the western edge of the Venetian dominion as I said it's not a big city but it's it's an important city in port sighs with a strong local community and he likes it so much there that he stays decides to stay but the initial impetus is this this is an altarpiece that is commissioned for church but with the authority of Bergamo behind of the city behind it to commemorate the fact that bergen has gone come back to Venetian rule after a few years of being ruled over by the French and so it's a political manifestation as well as a religious one and it's a huge altarpiece it's almost 8 meters tall it's enormous and you see it accommodates I think 13 figures in it it's the typical sacra conversazione ER with madonna and child surrounded by saints but Lata brings his his specific weirdness to it he it's very lucrative commission to and this is why why he I think he's attracted to it they're paying a lot of money for this and he wins the competition for it and indeed paints it and that settles it for him he's gonna stay in but I'm just gonna say a little bit about it it's you see it has the Saints here that's this receding strange darkness behind the Virgin which is quite unusual he'd never seen if things he comes up with little visual devices like that that this is empty space behind the Virgin with the columns here receding into the darkness it's very evocative and gives you sort of three dimensionality to it but also lots arts been quite naughty and he started painting this before they were all ready to be painted so you see down here the little angels they're busy still organizing this drapery here and they wanted to get in quarters they're not done yet they're not ready and the same with the angels up here they're still organizing all this these the hangings and the the the flower arrangements and so on the Garland's you see here they're still discussing and arguing over it and he's unwrapping a bouquet of flowers maybe to hang it somewhere but they're not ready and he's just started painting them this is very typical and quite wonderful you thought you'll find this in all artists large large-scale work of this period this painting is quite typical of his sensitivity to his sitters and his empathy and I was talking about emotional engagement before I think it comes out in a portrait like this is a double portrait of an important physician Giovanni Agostino della Torre who's since seated in front medical doctor trained in at the University of Padua an important citizen of Pergamum he is sitting in a chair with a volume of the antique physics physicist the classical physicist Galen whose work was still the model for for medical doctors at this time although that was changing quite dramatically in subsequent years yes letters here identifying him led us to him he has prescriptions over here written from this stained inkwell and other books related to this profession here with with title marks sticking out this is often how books were stored at the time with with the title written on on pieces of paper stuck in between them they were not lined up on the shelves like we do behind him is the son Nicola Denethor who ran the family business which was traded and traded in minerals various minerals and so on he was one of the richest men in Pergamum you see he seems a little uncomfortably inserted he's a bit bigger in scale and it's quite it's unclear how like how he occupies that quite shallow space behind javonni I guess echo steno and that does let scholars to speculate that he's inserted a bit later that he wasn't there wasn't intention to have him there from the beginning and I think that's that's probably right although it would have happened quite soon after because there's nothing to in if you look at cross-sections of the paint there's no indication that there was a layer varnish or dirt or anything like that between the two so it would have had to be painted quite soon after the rest what I think happened and what what helps us understand the portrait is that as you can see Giovanna Agostino here looks kind of sickly he's old and he's not necessarily in peak health and indeed he died the following year 1516 and that may have been the occasion for the portrait that that he was dying and the family wanted the portrait of him maybe even his son was but maybe he was the patron maybe he paid for it and wanted to paint his father before he because he was dying and then possibly this is just my speculation but possibly he had added his own portrait to it after his father's death to show the familial bond between them the pride they had in their common heritage and their what they build in Bergen I think there's a real intimacy in this portrait between the two of them and their and how they represent themselves as a family yes two generations I should just note down here there's a little fly landed on this handkerchief that's like a very sort of virtuosic visual trick that still has people fooled today we this is one of the pictures that we believe in the in the in the permanent display is because generally we don't glaze our pictures because we meet them easier to appreciate if they're not placed but this because people tend to want to touch that fly we put glass on it to protect the painting the fly however at the same time of course is a symbol of disease and ultimately death and I think what Lotto signifying here is that that that death is present or us or disease and he likes symbols like that as well as we'll get to see not least in this picture of lagina Prem Bhatia and Mr Craddock woman in Bergamo he also painted her husband and she's here in all her finery is like beautifully rendered dress with these scallop shells and these pearls and golden chain with a very strange pendant on here a weasel stole and this capital Yara which is which is a headpiece that was very fashionable in northern Italy for about ten years because the Martinus of Mantua is a better death they wore one she had been smitten with syphilis from her philandering husband and was losing her hair and so she came up with this kind of hairpiece to show two hydrogen's bald spots and it became fashion so all ladies of a certain standing would be wearing these and you'll see them in many of lotos pictures it was about 10-15 years of fashion and lots I was somebody was extremely attentive to fashion and to clothing and what it says about the sitter and what it says about their self conception more so I think that most artists and it comes out also because he renders it so precisely interestingly Lucchino here is it's rendered on the a nocturnal landscape behind her at night and that is something pioneered by George Oni and various other artists in in Venice it's a Venetian thing this is nocturnal and it did not turn and it's quite fashionable at the time but it's it's rare to see in portraits and the reason he's thought he's doing it here it's because he wants the moon in there because the moon helps identify her you see there see I've written in the moon here moon in Italian is Luna and we should put CI inside Luna it's Lucena and that's her name and then her family crest is on the ring down here so she's latina bream Botti and that's actually how we found out like not we but one of my predecessors found out that it that it's her now identify her so that's quite interesting there's there various symbolic interpretations of the Wiesel stole and so on you can read about those in the catalogue some of them are quite creative and compelling I mean the thing about lots are you don't know never know how far to take your interpretations of the symbology because he really is somebody who likes that kind of thing here similarly you have a it's a couple getting married it's Mysterio Casati who's the who's a comfort comes from an important merchant family and he's marrying up into a noble family Faustina here is his his bride is from a noble family and he's marrying into into money and prestige he's about to place the ring on her finger and again you see she's wearing a red dress which is a wedding dress this is the wedding my wedding dress has looked and her jewelry is rendered with with utmost attention and this little cameo she has here we have a similar cameo in the exhibition to show it shows the Roman Empress Festina the elder who was regardless of virtuous and and and strong wife traditionally so it's it's sort of ties into her what what she herself conception and how she was like to be thought of as she's also wearing this caviar it's it's it's what I forgot to mention it's woman from from a combination of wool and human hair it's it's a really strange accoutrement but anyway so again we have fashion and so on but I think what's interesting first as a symbology is very funny it's Kewpie troupe 'it's the god of love joking them together like they were cattle which is like something a lot to enjoy that kind of thing it's not an unprecedented iconography but it's kind of odd it's not something you see a lot this that they're gonna be yoked together and then you see the expression she seems very sincere and she looks out on us he's she's posing for a photograph so to speak he's like kind of cocky little bit smug and I maybe he's like because he's really made it here he's getting married I don't know this is maybe just my interpretation or maybe not even that but what's interesting is that lotto is is telling us a story of these people by their facial expression their gestures that he's trying to get behind what's happening between them that there's a story to their union and it's not just a bland representation of them as exemplars of their class or something there is something going on and the qubit is looking at skew at mercy leo maybe he's in on the joke that that this is about money or or he's maybe looking to admonish him that he has to remember actually to you know to take this seriously and not be so superficial about it or maybe something else I mean it's it's it's up to anybody to interpret that facial expression but I think something is definitely going on and this is the kind of psychology that's so interesting in in in lotto lots of gets many much work he becomes the dominant painter in Bergen MO and he works for both private clients and for the church and so on this is a gloriously bizarre take a fresco decoration of a small oratory this this building here outside a Bergamo in Tresckow about in the audio and I'll just show you the images I'm not gonna talk about it at length because it's it's very complicated but you see how weird it is it's Christ's as a tree with branches coming on have been holding roundels of profits and then there's an important story of the Saints from the golden legend here but the story gets told across the surface of the painting here very strange he also and this is another very important Commission I think key to understanding a lot so if one wants to go further is this Commission which is is for the choir of Center majora which is the choir up here he designs the intarsia panels in these weather the monks sit the congregations of DM yes and it's it it's narrative scenes with these covers with covers that have sort of hermetic symbology hieroglyphics and things like that how are glyph fix was something that nobody really understood people knew that it existed it was fascinating obviously nobody could read them and it was in Egypt so it was limited what came to Italy but there was a great interest in it and lotsa was right there with the with the most interested weird symbols of that pertain to the religious message of the narrative scenes but also incorporates all this humanist knowledge that is not necessarily something you see in religious scenes we have one of his model drawings for it this is a drawing that has little annotations you see I can't see it from here but they're little so you see little here here he's writing what the different elements are and what colors they should be because somebody else was going to cut it in wood and do these these wood inlays intarsia this is Judith and all the furnace used and it's it's just to indicate the level of invention he's at in terms of narrative scenes there's a lot going on here and it's it's it is odd you see actually people peeing up here there's a lot sort of profane detail and a lot of people sleeping and he's very good at depicting that and so on here you see some surface details just a wonderful differentiation of textures for the different kinds of woods and surface treatment creating depth and color and and nuance shadow and so on they're really beautiful and and it's something that you saw he walked on for seven eight years into his his next move which is to Venice so at some point he decides okay and I've gotten where I can with with Bergamo and now I've got to move back to Venice they're the most cosmopolitan city in in Europe where I can surely attract a more important clientele richer and more diverse clientele so he moves back to his city of birth and stays there for about eight years he still has that intarsia Commission and works on that for a number of years and falls out with a with the the patrons and has a lot of controversies over that but he works in Venice and in Venice what you see here beautifully he has somehow he has to compete with the upper echelon of patronage and and and and and and artists notably Titian he does get commissions largely religious Commission's such as this one showing st. Nicholas in the cloud surrounded by saints with a beautiful landscape also quite Germanic in some ways at the bottom but he doesn't get many of them because this guy is around and not the guy she painted but the guy painted in Titian Titian is about ten years younger than lotto eight to ten years long younger than lotto and when he left man as he was but a youth he was not really hadn't coming into his own as an artist but at this time he's the dominant artist in Venice and he's quickly becoming the most famous artist in Italy except for Michelangelo it's it's it's it's that kind of level of stature and he paints for Dukes and princes and eventually for the Pope and for the Holy Roman Emperor he's working at the highest level in terms of class a social class and he's obviously a great portrait just very influential and you see when Titian paints a portrait it's also very psychologically astute just like Lotto but he makes his sitters she changes the EP idealizes them and he kind of monumental eise's them he makes them bigger and larger than life and and elevates their personalities into some more timeless fear and lots of takes on some of that you seen in the in his most famous portrait and indeed probably his most famous artwork they would only portrait which is obviously a centerpiece in the exhibition he has that amplitude that's that monumentality that that Titian has in his portrait so lots I was competing for commissions with Titian and and it's really important I think where he goes the furthest and push pushes him to innovation and Oh Tony is he's a collector of Antiquities he's a an official in the Venetian administration and an important tax office that on import of wine which makes him very rich because he's he gets its tax proceeds from that so he collects antiquities he also collects Contemporary Art by all the great artists of the time including tuition Giorgione he has he has palma vecchio he has all these artists but he asked lotto to paint his portrait probably because he knows lotto is going to do a great job and indeed he does one of the implemented portraits of the renaissance here Oh Tony is surrounded by antique sculpture and see coins a book which may also contain a classic text and it seems very an assertive portrait that he's showing off his great collection and his greatness in general but it's also very earnest you see there's an earnestness to the way that he looks at us he has he this soft beard and there's there's a kind heir to him I think too and he offers us this to look at this art omission the this efficient Artemis statuette yeah he has in his hand while his other hand is on his heart fingering a crucifix and you'll see in the exhibition we have actually found we have borrowed some of the sculpture that is in the in the portrait this statue either of a man of a woman said to be Venus interpreted by Lotto as a woman I think is actually the actual one that he painted and it was in a famous collection in Padua the bust of Hadrian which is mostly Romani collection the most important collection of Antiquities in Venice you have to remember Venice was not a didn't have classical ruins and didn't have that kind of pass so antiquities were few and far between so any antiquities in the collections were very closely studied by artists and other people who were interested and this was famous amongst artists and that's here and we know that Tony actually owned a plaster cast of that so that's maybe the only object in the in the portrait the portrait that he actually owned everything else is it comes from elsewhere these are things from the Vatican but typically for lotto he doesn't I mean this is Hadrian it's one of the most famous and admire of the Roman emperors and he Peaks on the table with a tablecloth over his hand and he looks very much alive like he's crawling out under the table and is this very lot oh it's just he can't like just stay serious about this kind of thing also over here we have a Venus pulling on her sandals and resting a foot is broken but there's a sort of a basin here and the little Hercules is peeing into it so it's not very you know it's not undercuts the seriousness in a way and makes it informal and then indeed what is the significance of this statuette that he's handing us this is sort of this is a similar thing that we have an exhibition it's not the one that is actually here but it's it's the kind of statuette and it's it's it's a fairly recent discovery around 1,500 these catalyst automation this efficient hearts Artemis which is a fertility goddess but at the time it's not really connected with fertility despite the many many breasts many many full breasts that she has she is connected with Natural Philosophy and she's sort of a spirit of nature and what what Tony is probably trying to show us is the union of in his in his aspirations and intellectual aspirations between natural philosophy and Christianity that's one way of interpreting this gesture that he's wants to emphasize that and so the whole picture becomes about his philosophy of life in a way and understanding of himself got to say something about this too it's it's another landscape format portrait not portrait format but landscape format and it's we saw how lots of have been painting double portraits and you see that in exhibition even more in landscape format in Bergamo he that's the traditional marriage portrait or another doll portrait you'll have a landscape format to accommodate the two sitters lot so then start using that for single sitters and that gives him more space to include elements like the sculptures around a donee or indeed here and it gives him space to let the the figure really assert him or herself and this is his most assertive portrait his most heroic portrait and it's a woman I think that's very important and tells us a lot about lotto she is very finely dressed she's probably aristocrat of some sort probably her name is Lucretia because she's showing herself as the Broman Heron Lucretia who is illustrated on this drawing stabbing herself to death after having been raped not being able to live with a dishonor of that and down here a quote from Lucretia from the classical sources saying that no unchaste woman claimed my example so what this woman is trying to show is that she adheres to the ideals that the ideal of Lucretia Lucretia as a role model she is prepared to die for her die for her honor not and is faithful and virtuous so this is a woman who is conforming to very gender normative ideals at the time very masculine a male-dominated social norm that wife has to be faithful and virtuous and and so on and she has to be ready to die for that for that ideal however when you sense that look at what's going on she's not your prim buttoned-up nice high housewife is she I mean she she's very ostentatiously dressed her marriage chain which is a marital chain stuffed into her bodice it's not around her neck her veil is pulled behind her head and doesn't cover her bosom and she's quite seductive and and she's alone a husband is clearly not there because the chair is empty and it's somebody's brought us maybe brought her flowers maybe I don't really exactly know but this Wallflower what it is exactly what it what it means but something's going on there's a seductiveness to it and she meets her eye our eyes however she's not there as eye candy she's not there to you know appeal to the male gay so to speak she's returning our gaze and she's asserting herself and her identity and her autonomy as a person and I think that's extremely interesting we don't know what the story behind this picture we're very serious but we really don't know but Lotso is the paint is painting a woman in a way that you see nobody do it this time it's it's very unusual it's unparalleled I think it's one of the most remarkable portraits of this period what it reminds me of is Manny's very famous portrait of Olympia they will eliminate the the prostitute who is lying on her bed nude but fully in control of who she is and looking at us with a similarly piercing glance that's the parallel I would draw it's it's front to many it's really quite unusual and I think proto-feminist in a way and shows us lots of interest in his subjects and his his nuanced understanding of them so lotto has some difficulty making it in Venice not least because petition but also just it's just difficult that his style is becoming it's it's too odd for this cosmopolitan audience and also feels a bit old-fashioned too I think too many of them so he starts looking for work elsewhere and the last twenty years twenty odd years of his career he travels almost constantly seeking out patronage and increasingly remote locations Treviso where he already has like a base because he used to live there a little bit in bergen MO but primarily in the Mokka the region of the market down here and it's very small towns where he paints altar pieces and so on and it's a period of great difficulty increasing difficulty for him he is struggling financially he is alone he never marries he never has children he is an irrational temperamental individual who falls out with his patrons and with his landlords and has to move all the time and even his family he often stays with relatives and they falls out with them so he's not an easy person to be with her to have to work for you and reason we know all this is because the last part of his career from about almost 20 years he keeps an account book with list I probably also did earlier but we don't have that but he lists wait lists all his expenses and it becomes if you read between the lines a kind of diary about the people he meets and his relationships with them and also he edits his will several times and we have to - out of at least three wells he completed where he's lamenting his misfortune and so on so we get a real sense of his his state of mind and and how it deteriorates and how he feels I what we would describe is depressed I've been here he's clinically depressed it's of course difficult to diagnose somebody list 500 years ago but that seems to be the case and what's going on with him and indeed it's as we'll see it manifests in his art this we're very happy to have in the exhibition it's this last great commission in Venice and it's commissioned by the Confraternity at santa giovanni paolo in in the in the city it's the most important dominican church in the city and Lotto has very close relationships with the Confraternity there he knows them he's lodged with them on several occasions and he's obtained permission to be buried there not with the with the necessarily with the with the the Friars but with the poor because they were to have a cemetery for the poor most young so that the lowest level and it's and part of his obtaining this Commission of obtaining this permission he paints this for them and this is a very strange altarpiece that's still in the church there and has come to the exhibition you'll see in the exhibition that it's kind of low to the ground because we don't have the vertical space to fully represent it but we have at least put a frame around it to give us give a sense of of its its original setting it illustrates a very strange but it's a very strange composition and it illustrates a specific treatise by st. Antoninus of Florence who was bishop of Florence in the early 15th century and was since sainted and had not been the subject of any altarpieces at this point he's a fairly obscure saint it was important to the Dominicans obviously he wrote a treatise about helping the poor he was very invested in that as a mission of the church and had a system for assessing that how much like the the deserving poor to what extent you know to what the arms should be distributed to support people and how you assess their supplications and here you see poor people come in handing their supplications to the deacon here who then hands it over to the canon who's taking money out of a person giving it to them Antoninus up here is receiving instruction from the angels so we could be sure that his judgment who deserves what is gonna be just and lots of painters are sort of a vision it's a sort of a bureaucratic scene but it's like it's a it's a heavenly vision at the same time with a red curtain being drawn apart by angels it's deeply bizarre with sort of a Garden of Eden type closed garden behind her and behind them usually it's the Virgin who sits here but now it's the Senate scene Antoninus also kind of unusual and we have these beautiful rugs here and it's wholly on rugs I'm just going to say quickly clearly their portraits in this in this altarpiece which is again why we have it here and here we have to be doing probably members of the congregation we don't know who they are this may have been the prior of the congregation but we have these beautiful rugs in front and those in large parts of Europe these have become known as lots of rocks because he painted them so much sometimes alternatively hall buying carpets you'll see them in the one in the ambassador's for example as well these were luxury objects imported from Asia Minor what is now Turkey and from Western and Anatolia and you see them in you would see them in in in in in fine homes but also in churches and in churches they are in religious conversations they become symbolic of the Garden of Eden and often with the Virgin's feet resting on them and there was of course if the designs are so beautiful that they attracted painters of painters would depict them and collectors would buy them and we luckily have one of these in the exhibition lots of exhibition with objects without a lot o carpet would not be a lot of excitation a problem lots of exhibition most interesting about this painting I think however is the poor his portrayal of the poor we know that Lotto painted or paid poor people to sit for him so these are actual portraits of poor Venetians and that is almost on I can it's I think unheard on all those might have paid poor people to sit but for basic four types he's he wants their likenesses and he wants insert their likeness into and also piece in a important church very unusual and it shows his again his empathy and his feeling of allegiance with the poor he himself was becoming poor at this time and there's indeed a theory that this is a self-portrait I don't want to into it here you can read about it in the catalog I'm not sure I believe in it but it's possible it certainly shows his sympathy for that class of people and you see many different types of people you see formally aristocratic people with veils and so on and still in their fine clothes but Wow destitute you see like really destitute people and you see a little girl with with a stick here maybe maybe leading a blind person or something I mean we don't really know what this but the the level of detail is quite fascinating and because the painting is sitting so low in our display you can really see this this part of it so that's one advantage of not having a lot of space but as I said he's depressed at this time I think quite clearly and you see it in his paintings lottos portraiture as in general is a portraiture of what I would could describe as the emerging middle class it was of course not described as the middle class at this time but or the the what we also understand is the bourgeois see again that's an anachronistic term it's not what they was described that at this time but that's the class that he really paints he doesn't paints princes and Pope's and emperors and so on like Titian he paints the class that would come to dominate European society and history the new class that had merchants artisans officials politicians clerics minor aristocrats and so on and his portraiture seen as a whole is is I think a portrait of this class and the new force to be reckoned with in Europe at the same time however it's autobiography is undoubtedly autobiography because all his sitters in the latter part of his years look depressed and I don't think that you know that they're all were depressed I mean they're different people and they probably there had very different personalities and so on and I don't do think the personalities come out but at the same time there is this melancholy aspect he's also painting with cheaper pigments Browns blacks he doesn't has doesn't have the brilliant colors of this Bergen period I think he can't afford those pigments and he also prefers this and I think it's his state of mind that comes out of these late portraits of which we have quite a few in the exhibitions so I'm very happy about they're still a piercing and very intimate understanding of who they are I think attend this man who's quite modesty clothes he wears fine clothes but not read very rich ones and he has a felt hat it's a beautifully preserved painting worth studying up close and he survey's seems a bit shy nervous at being painted as many of us will probably know you know when people come and want to take a photograph off you don't know what to do and you try to like look right and you get it all wrong and it looks terrible and I think there's a bit of that here he's he's slightly shy and camera shy in a way with his tousled hair and and and so on so very compelling portrait we don't know who he is and this man over here I think is one of the great paintings in the in the show it's it's of a wealthy man probably from Treviso Liberata de pinna del who was notoriously arrogant and and and brutal and that's just not what we see here we may not be him but it's a strong case for it being him but lots of see something else in this man whether it's him or not he sees somebody ravaged by old age he looks that out on us with these slightly wet eyes and he has his skin is crumbling and it's actually in the texture of the paint itself lotos touch at this point becomes very sort of chalky and crumbly and he layers his strokes on top of each other without integrating them so highlights just lie on top quite dryly you see that very much in his hands and you can see the veins under his his parchment-like skin you see this the the Rays of the Sun capturing strands of his of his beard it's really worth looking at this closely it's unfortunately quite dirty so it's a little harder to access than the one on the left because it's it's condition and it's the dirt and the blanched varnish on it but do take a look at it and then he holds a pair of gloves which is also something Titian excelled at at the mutation really came up with and then a handkerchief and there's a slight tension in the way he holds it this is this is somebody marked by life and I think it's it's just a searing portrait of you know if you show me a human portrait and what it reminds me most off actually is his Rembrandt there's no direct connection between Rembrandt and Lotto that we know of like bren-bren knew about LOTOS i don't know but they they're both attuned to aspects of being human that are very similar and I think it speaks to lottos great perspicacity as an artist and and what makes him so important is that that he understands this at a point when few other artists do and other artists like Rembrandt great artists pick up on it not from lotto but pick up on the same qualities it's these are the difficult on articulated emotions the ones that we don't really that we can't articulate and it's maybe one might even go into the into talking about the subconscious and so on a sense of the subconscious obviously that's a completely on a critic term that they have no concept of at this time but at least not that how we understand it but but I think it's there and I think what makes him so important as a portraitist he's not he's not very influential in his immediate aftermath he was out of fashion as I said and he dies in 1556 virtually I guess an obscure artist he dies at Loreto the Santa Casa the holy house of at Loreto inside that church beautifully situated on top of the hill is the childhood home of the Virgin which miraculously was lifted up from the Holy Land by angels and flown to Italy conveniently and landed there and they built his church around and is very important Eligius site and in 1552 Lotto joins the congregation there in recognition of that he can no longer support himself as a painter he continues to paint but he's he's living at the life as a as part of the Confraternity and his last paintings are painted for them and this is one of them it's at Loreto and it's it's very bizarre and and and it's quite sort of quietly moving you see it's the presentation of the child the Christ child in the in the temple with the rabbi here it's something touching also that he's painting a child as one of his last paintings he's somebody who had a great affinity for children and you see in this account book he notes how he was buying gifts for the children of his landlords and so on he had a clear affinity for children even though he never had any of his own I'm probably reading too much into this painting but I think that's one touching thing about it but it's also just very interesting to look at it closely the the altar in the temple has human feet I have no explanation and and you see here the way that that the the onlookers have painted very sketchily sort of very loosely and sketchily and not beautifully you know and in in in any traditional sense of the word but with great expressive I think energy it reminds me of Gaius little little oil oil paintings of figures is there something to that here and then above the scene there's this big empty space which these are monks benches or something like that but it's just an empty space with some figures coming in here and this ghostly sort of ghostly figures up here but it's an empty space and I think this is a space of the mind of the soul this is a psychological space and a very fitting and toulatos career which indeed ends around this time in 1556 at Loreto largely forgotten but leaving us a great legacy of portraiture and indeed art thank you

Channel: The National Gallery

Views: 43,449

Keywords: Lorenzo Lotto, Portraiture, Renaissance, Italy, Symbolism, Painting, National Gallery, Lorenzo Lotto Portraits, Portraits, Lotto, Lotto Portraits, Matthias Wivel, Curator, Curator's introduction

Id: v-lXGnfQJME

Length: 62min 14sec (3734 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 05 2018