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 German Baroque artist Johann Carl Loth, known in Italy as Carlotto.

Bernard Berenson initiated the revival of Lotto’s name and reputation with his monograph on the artist of 1895. But widespread appreciation has come about thanks to exhibitions in Italy, France, England and the US. Unprecedented in its scope is the current splendid show, curated by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, displaying Lotto’s works in all their richness and variety and confirming his rightful position in the artistic pantheon.

The 54 works here — of religious, classical and allegorical subjects, and portraiture — include 17 paintings conserved and restored especially for the exhibition, among them nearly a dozen altarpieces. The first room has three of these from the Veneto and the Marche — from near Treviso, Asolo and Recanati — painted when Lotto was still in his mid-twenties. Although drawing on the example of his great artistic forerunners and contemporaries in Venice (he was born in the city around 1480), these early works demonstrate that he was already a master who had established a style of his own.

The Recanati high altar was painted for the church of San Domenico and he received commissions from this order throughout the rest of his career.