Marginal magnificence

ART history, like all the intellectual systems we construct to make sense of the world, is prone to simplifications.

ART history, like all the intellectual systems we construct to make sense of the world, is prone to simplifications.

The most insidious of these is the fallacy of progress in art, the tendency to see each period, from the early Renaissance to abstraction and beyond, as successive steps in the unfolding of an inevitable destiny. The historicist model of Hegelianism and the experience of real progress in science and technology too often have combined to make the progressivist model an uncritical assumption, when we should really be alert to the changing priorities of different periods.

Even periodisation, however, is a kind of necessary evil, indispensable to making sense of the changing circumstances of artists and the different styles that develop through time, but inevitably constraining when applied to any particular individual. This is true even of the greatest and most central or defining figures in any time, but even more so of those who appear to be marginal or eccentric. The case of Lorenzo Lotto, whose work is surveyed in a magnificent exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale -- the most important of several substantial shows in Rome this northern spring -- is particularly complex. Unlike his contemporary and compatriot Titian, who was celebrated, amply rewarded and even called divine in his own lifetime, and has continued to be one of the classics of the art of painting, Lotto slipped into poverty in later life and was subsequently almost completely forgotten until his life and work were recovered by Morelli and others, and first properly studied in a fundamental work by Bernard Berenson in 1895.

Lotto was born in Venice in 1480 and died in 1556, ending his life as a lay brother at the Holy Sanctuary of Loreto after years of financial difficulties and unhappiness; in fact he seems always to have been somewhat neurotic and idiosyncratic, a loner with a personal vision that was never quite in step with any of the dominant stylistic movements of his lifetime.

Vasari, in his brief notes on the artist's life, says Lotto began by being influenced by Bellini and was then drawn to the style of Giorgione. The earliest works in the exhibition, such as Madonna and Child with Saints (1504-05) or Apparition of the Virgin to Sts Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse (1506), recall both artists, as well as Mantegna, Vivarini and Durer, and some other Venetian contemporaries -- he was a close friend of Palma Vecchio. The second picture in particular is strikingly beautiful, with bright fresh colours, a clear and limpid luminosity, a fine landscape background and deep sincerity in the expressive attitudes and features of the two saints, contrasting with a slightly dour and plain Virgin.

On the other hand, we can already see some of the qualities that even at the time must have made him seem rather old-fashioned: he retains the clearly defined edges of the 15th century, ignoring leonardesque sfumato and the new Venetian concern for atmosphere, which in the hands of Giorgione and Titian led to a synthesis of colour and tone.

His grasp of anatomy is limited. This is a common fault among the Venetian and northern painters, who did not share the culture of drawing of the Florentine quattrocento and the Roman high Renaissance. It would be subject of complaints during the line v colour debate at the French Academy in the following century; but Lotto's drawing is much weaker than Titian's and recalls the Ferrarese Dosso Dossi, whose figures are likewise full of feeling but anatomically approximate.

Lotto's limitations did not impede his early success in the north, and thanks to Bramante he was invited to Rome in 1508. His contemporaries there were Michelangelo and Raphael, two of the greatest draughtsmen in the history of art, and Lotto's work must have looked distinctly odd and provincial. He left after a couple of years and returned to the north, where he continued to enjoy considerable success for some time.

The Transfiguration of Christ (1511-12), strongly influenced by Raphael, shows the utter incompatibility of Lotto's inspiration and abilities as an artist with the ideals of the high Renaissance. Space, perspective and anatomy are all painfully confused, while the picture's virtues consist once again in expression and the handling of colour. The slightly later Stoning of St Stephen (1513-16) is remarkable for an expressive animation in the attitudes of the killers that goes far beyond the artist's anatomical competence and results in a strangely surreal intensity.

Something similar happens in Susanna and the Elders (1517); expressive action seems to spin out of control, as when a cyclist's feet come off the pedals of his bike, while the style of the figures, the speech scrolls like voice balloons, and the division of the composition all appear quaintly old-fashioned. In reality the reason for the compositional eccentricity is that the background evokes the closed garden (hortus conclusus) of the Virgin Mary, symbolising her purity; she is seen walking on the left. It is a peculiar association of themes, one that speaks of an artist diverging from the mainstream into his own preoccupations.

In the later 1520s and early 1530s, Lotto assimilates some of the naturalism of the Bassano family and especially the graceful high Renaissance style of Correggio, which imbues pictures such as the Madonna and Child with Sts Catherine of Alexandria and Thomas (1528-30) with harmony and serenity, the beautiful correggesque angel an uncanny precursor of the pre-Raphaelite ideal.

The pictures are motivated, however, by a theological vision that is as intense as it is unusual. Thus, in the Holy Family with St Catherine (1533), Joseph lifts the sheet covering the sleeping Jesus and seems to point to the infant's genitals, on which the eyes of the saint are intently fixed.

The Annunciation (1534-35), from the beginning of a restless period in the artist's later life, is a much stranger picture again. The Virgin faces the viewer rather than the angel, as though in her own thoughts. A cat runs across the empty space between the two figures, like an electric spark between two poles. The composition, almost mannerist in its dislocation, is filled with naturalistic details in an old-fashioned style that recalls Carpaccio; among these is a shawl hanging from a peg, to which Lotto has given the precise form of a vulva. The figure of God the father, in the clouds above, aims his gaze and hands towards the shawl, as though he were about to dive into its opening.

As remarkable as the devotional paintings are Lotto's portraits, which are among the most outstanding and memorable of the century. If he was a neurotic individual, his neurosis was not of the narcissistic kind that precludes understanding of others. On the contrary, Lotto seems to have an exceptional, almost chameleon-like ability to identify and sympathise with his sitters.

A pair of late portraits hanging side by side in the exhibition illustrates this particularly well. The first is of Fra Gregorio Belo of Vicenza (1547), who is seen, dressed in heavy brown robes with a belt, in a dawn landscape. The absorption of his religious meditation is expressed in the inclination of the whole body as well as the set of the mouth and the passionate eyes, which look straight out to confront the viewer. With one closed fist he appears to strike his breast, echoing the iconography of St Jerome, for the friar belongs to the Hieronymite order, while in the other hand he holds the Bible whose translation from Hebrew and Greek into Latin was the saint's great work. In the background is a crucifixion, as though conjured in the friar's mind by the intensity of his meditation. No doubt Lotto felt a particular connection with this deeply religious man, but he was equally capable of responding to the strange detachment of the Crossbowman (c. 1552), who looks out past us and into the distance in a dreamy yet slightly menacing way as he poses with his exquisitely crafted instrument of death.

Looking directly at the viewer was a motif already employed by Lotto in his religious pictures. Alberti had suggested in his De Pictura (1435) that a painting should have a figure who makes eye contact with the audience, and in the Sacre conversazioni of Bellini there is usually one of the saints who turns towards us. Lotto follows him in this, but often prefers to make the Virgin herself look out at the viewer, as in the Madonna with Sts John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria (1522), or the two versions of the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1523 and 1524); in 1526, it is Christ carrying the cross who meets our eyes, and in the Saint Bernardino Altarpiece (1521) an angel with a slightly reproachful expression turns around as though we have interrupted him as he writes in an open ledger.

In the portraits, as often enough but not inevitably in the work of Lotto's contemporaries, this gaze becomes the mark of the artist's own connection with the sitter, and seems to reveal the individual's innermost character despite all attempts to preserve distance, privacy and even bearing. Lotto convinces us that he has seen all there is to see, from the bovine vacuity of the unknown lady of 1501-02 to the somewhat nervous sensitivity of the young bishop Bernardo de Rossi (1505), the knowing toughness of the Dominican writing in his ledger (1526) or the slightly vulnerable generosity of Andrea Odoni (1527), surrounded by the extraordinary collection of ancient sculptures among which Vasari saw the picture.

The double portraits are remarkable, too, from a pair of doctors (1515), the father reserved and impassive, the son -- perhaps added as an afterthought -- curious and almost anxious, to the melancholy of surgeon Giovanni Giacomo Bonamigo, no doubt widowed, with his arm protectively around his young son (1544).

Lotto's portraits form a unique gallery of the men and women of his time, complementing the complex meditation in his religious works and several mythological and allegorical subjects whose meanings are characteristically involved and recondite. The exhibition is full of paintings that are individually beautiful and absorbing, and is particularly interesting for anyone who has seen isolated works by the artist and been struck by the sense that they don't quite fit into the patterns of art history with which we are generally familiar.

In the end, this exhibition not only provides a unique opportunity to understand more about an important artist of the cinquecento; it reminds us too that art history is full of individuals who are to varying degrees exceptional -- think of Balthus in the 20th century -- and that conspicuous flaws and eccentricities are not incompatible with greatness.

Lorenzo Lotto
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, until June 12