Martin Gayford

Face time | 15 November 2018

In his realism, and the anxieties and melancholies of his subjects, Lotto’s spirit is very contemporary, as this marvellous new National Gallery exhibition shows

You can, perhaps, glimpse Lorenzo Lotto himself in the National Gallery’s marvellous exhibition, Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits. At the base of an altarpiece from 1541 a gaggle of paupers stretch their arms up in hopes of receiving the charity being handed out by Dominican friars above. One of these, a bearded, red-robed man, is supposed to be a self-portrait.

If that is the case, it was a characteristic place to put himself. Lotto (1480/1–1556/7) was an intensely pious man and, in later life, poverty-stricken. But the most unusual point about this picture is that for the rest of the crowd of indigents he made studies from life of genuine poor people (and noted the modelling fee he paid them in his book of accounts). Few other Italian Renaissance artists would have striven so hard for verisimilitude.

Like Caravaggio more than half a century later, Lotto seems to have been an artist who preferred to work as much as possible from life. The results he got could be startlingly close to photography. His portrait of ‘Bishop Bernardo de’ Rossi’ (1505) (see p31) is an amazingly exact account of the fall of light across this man’s soft features, delicately picking up each fold of skin, the moles along the line of his chin and the indentation at the point of his nose.

Lotto, though erratic, was at his best a truly great painter of human individuals. But he also painted portraits not just of people but of things. The untidy desk in the double portrait of ‘Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his son, Niccolo’ is a careful depiction of real bureaucratic clutter, down to the white inkstand spattered with drops of black.

Time and again Lotto focuses sharply on a single item such as this humble office utensil or one of the Anatolian rugs he painted so memorably that they’ve been given the name ‘Lotto’ carpets.

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