Word: lotto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lotto liked to inject unexpected naturalist details into religious scenes, but once there, they don't rupture the sacred moment; they enhance it. Thus in his Adoration of the Shepherds, circa 1534, one of the shepherds is showing the baby Christ a lamb, whose head the child grabs at, nearly sticking his thumb in its eye, with infantile curiosity. This looks like the most natural of gestures, but it makes a fluent symbolic point as well, since one is expected to read it as Christ embracing the image of his future self-sacrifice, the Paschal Lamb...
...Lotto was born in Venice, and he lived there intermittently through the last 24 years of his life, but most of his work was done in the "provinces"--not necessarily a bad thing for a painter in the early 16th century, since the competition in Venice was so intense and intelligent patronage was plentiful in smaller towns. Lotto seems to have been diligent rather than aggressive: hypersensitive, a loner and ill-adapted to the scramble for commissions. "Old, alone, without anyone faithful to manage things for me, and very anxious in my mind"--so he described himself in his will...
...easy to forge a career in the same city, at the same time, as a man of Titian's stature. Titian used up all the air in the room; you couldn't compete with him. But Lotto wasn't trying to be Titian (which was just as well), and this, in the stacked deck of hierarchical opinion, which didn't take account of the fact that different artists had different aims and temperaments, told against his reputation. After he died, it went into decline. Lotto didn't drop out of sight, like Vermeer, and have to be completely rediscovered...
...Serious Lotto scholarship, based on newly unearthed documents (including Lotto's studio journal), didn't begin until the late 19th century. When Bernard Berenson wrote the monograph that defined Lotto's oeuvre in 1895, he caused a scandal by throwing out scores of pseudo-Lottos. Collectors, particularly ducal ones in Britain, were enraged by the high-handedness with which this young, upstart American Jew downgraded their swans to ducks, but the fact was that Berenson was 90% right in his Lotto reattributions. From this point the critical overhaul of Lotto slowly began...
...sown with recondite allegories, complicated quirks, unexpected twists of meaning. Despite its often ravishing formal beauty, it is full of unease. Apart from Durer's famous etching Melancholia, Renaissance art can show no more poignant portrayal of the way depression freezes both action and curiosity in its sufferers than Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1530. It depicts its subject with sallow face, deep dark eyes and Hamlet-black clothes, idly toying with the pages of an unread book; drying rose petals are scattered on the table next to a watching lizard, emblem of cold-bloodedness...