Few painters of the Renaissance kept a ledger of their own disappointments. Lorenzo Lotto did, and in it he recorded, without self-pity, the failure of an auction of his pictures at Ancona in 1550. Born in Venice around 1480 and dead by 1556 or 1557, he was an Italian painter, draughtsman and designer whose name is filed, a little uneasily, under the Venetian school. Most of his working life was spent elsewhere - in Treviso, the Marche, Rome and Bergamo - among provincial patrons who wanted something other than Titian.
Of his training almost nothing is known. Contemporary Venetian painting he knew intimately, and the quiet gravity of Giovanni Bellini settles over the Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome of 1506, now in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. Giorgione mattered too, chiefly for the naturalism of the early portraits and for the odd, coded Allegory of Virtue and Vice. Detached classicism gave way over the decades to something more highly strung, closer in temperature to Correggio in Parma than to anything being painted on the lagoon.
Venice was crowded in any case. Giorgione, Palma il Vecchio and above all Titian held the field, though Vasari, in the third part of the Vite, records a friendship between Lotto and Palma. So the young man went to Treviso, a prosperous town within the Venetian domain, where he worked from 1503 to 1506 under the protection of Bishop Bernardo de' Rossi. The Allegory of 1505, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, served as a cover for the bishop's portrait of the same year, today at Capodimonte in Naples - a pointed conceit for a prelate who had lately survived an attempt on his life. Saint Jerome in the Desert, in the Louvre, betrays a draughtsman still learning; yet the rocky wilderness, keyed to the red of the saint's robe, is worked with a miniaturist's patience. Two early altarpieces followed, for Santa Cristina al Tiverone in 1505 and the baptistery of Asolo Cathedral in 1506. Both remain in place.
In 1506 he moved south into the Marche. The Recanati Polyptych for San Domenico, begun in 1508, is conventional in structure - two tiers, six panels - but the years around it gave us the Young Man against a White Curtain in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the Adoration of the Child in Kraków, where Catherine Cornaro, dispossessed Queen of Cyprus, appears in the guise of Saint Catherine. Bramante, the papal architect, passed through the pilgrimage town of Loreto and took notice. An invitation to Rome followed, to decorate apartments in the Vatican; not a fragment survives, the work having been destroyed within a few years. Lotto had leaned hard on Raphael, then ascendant at the papal court, and the same debt shows in the Transfiguration of the Recanati polyptych.
Back in the Marche by 1511, he painted an Entombment for the confraternity of the Buon Gesù at Jesi, still in the Pinacoteca Civica there, then a Transfiguration for Recanati and a fresco of Saint Vincent Ferrer in San Domenico. Bergamo came next, and with it twelve years that made him.
The westernmost town of the Venetian republic supplied merchants, jurists, physicians and minor aristocrats, all of whom wished to be looked at seriously. Commissioned in 1513 by Count Alessandro Martinengo-Colleoni, grandson of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, and finished in 1516 for the Dominican church of Santi Bartolomeo e Stefano, the Martinengo Altarpiece is grandly architectural, its debts to Bramante and Giorgione unconcealed. Frescoes and distemper decorations for San Bernardino and Sant'Alessandro in Colonna followed, then five further altarpieces between 1521 and 1523. His colour deepened. His drawing steadied. Most consequentially, he pushed the portrait towards psychology, extending a line opened by Antonello da Messina: in the Portrait of a Young Man with a Book, in the Accademia in Venice, the sitter glances up as though his reading had been interrupted and he has not yet decided whether to mind.
At Trescore, in 1524, he frescoed the Suardi Chapel with the lives of the saints, Saint Barbara among them, in small and closely observed episodes. In the Martyrdom of Saint Clare, Christ stands with vines springing from his hands, the Gospel image of the vine and the branches taken at its word. The same year brought cartoons of Old Testament subjects for the intarsia panels of the choir stalls at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo. More than twenty small devotional paintings belong to this period as well, Madonnas and a Deposition, made for prayer at home. He worked inside the classical tradition and then, gently, unsettled it, breaking the symmetry of the Virgin among saints and angels with contrary poses and countervailing movement.
Venice, on his return in 1525, proved less welcoming. Rooms at the Dominican convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo lasted only months, a quarrel with the intarsia master Fra Damiano da Bergamo bringing the arrangement to an end. To meet demand he founded a workshop. Five altarpieces went out to churches in the Marche and another to Santa Maria Assunta at Celano, while Santa Maria dei Carmini received a Saint Nicholas of Bari in Glory. Wealth in the city meant private orders, among them ten portraits: the Portrait of a Young Man now in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, and the Andrea Odoni of 1527 at Hampton Court, a collector nearly submerged in his own antiquities, a picture Titian evidently remembered when he came to paint Jacopo Strada in 1568.
After 1532 the record reads like a timetable. Treviso, then some seven years divided among Ancona, Macerata and Jesi, Venice again in 1540, Treviso in 1542, Venice in 1545, Ancona in 1549. Altarpieces and portraits still came, among them the Madonna of the Rosary of 1539 for San Domenico at Cingoli, its crowded composition held together by little more than the direction of glances. He moved to find work, and the work was thinning.
Then came the sale. He was about seventy when his pictures went badly at auction in Ancona in 1550, and the Libro di spese diverse, the book of expenses he had kept since 1538, registers the blow plainly. Two years later he entered the sanctuary at Loreto as a lay brother. There he worked on the decoration of the basilica and painted a Presentation in the Temple for the Palazzo Apostolico, its handling so loose that the figures seem on the point of dissolving into their own light. He died in 1556 and was buried, at his own request, in a Dominican habit.
Obscurity came quickly afterwards. Vasari had given him a place in the third volume of the Vite, and the letters and the ledger survive, so his daily life is better documented than that of many contemporaries; painters near Jesi took up his manner, among them Ercole Ramazzani, his pupil Durante Nobili and probably Giovanni Busi. The pictures, however, stayed in modest churches and provincial galleries, off the routes along which reputations were made, and the name faded. Bernard Berenson retrieved it at the close of the nineteenth century. Monographs and exhibitions followed - Venice in 1953, the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1998, the National Gallery in London on the portraits - and the long neglect now looks like an accident of geography rather than a verdict. Perhaps it took a sceptical age to see what Lorenzo Lotto had been doing all along. His sitters decline to perform. Wary, distracted, not quite persuaded by the occasion, they look back at us, and that unguarded quality keeps him nearer to the present than the serene faces that once eclipsed him.
