Power of invention

Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits alone should have secured him a place in history as a major Renaissance painter.

Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits alone should have secured him a place in history as a major Renaissance painter. Yet, ironically, while his works continued to be admired, his name was all but forgotten.

This paradoxical state of affairs came about because Lotto suffered from a steady series of posthumous misattributions, his works being assigned to the most bafflingly diverse range of other artists from Giorgione, Pordenone, Titian, Tintoretto, Dosso Dossi and Veronese to Perugino, Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Holbein, even Van Dyck, and an obscure 17th-century...