Word: lotto
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...sparsely documented man of whom enough will never be known: a devout religious painter who lived through a time of doctrinal crisis in the church, which left visible marks on his already self-reproachful and even morbid personality; a link between the exaggerated graces of Botticelli (who died when Lotto was around 30) and the learned artificialities of Mannerism; an Italian who saw the point of Netherlandish art and Hieronymus Bosch along with Germans like Altdorfer and, especially, Durer, not long after Durer himself was being changed by Venice...
...seems improbable that, by now, there could be such a creature as a great but little-known 16th century Italian painter, but so it is--at least in America--with Lorenzo Lotto (circa 1480-1556). The current show of 51 of his paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, co-curated by art historians David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, is actually the first ever held in the U.S. It can't pretend to give a full view of Lotto, the bulk of whose work consisted of some 40 altarpieces in various towns in northern Italy...
...Because Lotto was away from Venice in the first 20 years of the 16th century, he missed the "painterly" pictorial revolution that was going on there, which is why his work can look a bit liny and (relatively) old-fashioned, closer to Giovanni Bellini than to young Titian. Drawing creates more of his pictorial structure than color does; yet he was a marvelous colorist, suave, moody at times, and capable of a mysterious lyricism that reminds you of Giorgione, his senior by only a few years. Except that the color goes to extremes: icing-green, purple, sky blue and orange...
Today it is Lotto's strangeness that enchants--or, more precisely, the way he assimilates strangeness into naturalism. The show includes what must surely be the most peculiar image of the Annunciation ever painted. We're looking into the Virgin's chamber. She is in the foreground, looking girlish and distraught, facing you and throwing up her hands as though she were appealing for help. And why not? The angel, bearing the news that God has just impregnated her (you can see God in the background, as invasive and patriarchal as could be), seems to have fairly burst into...
...persuaded the authors of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill to remove new limits on the amount wealthy candidates can contribute to their own campaigns. Grumbles law professor Jamin Raskin: "Working-class people have about as much chance of running for Senate as they have of winning the lotto...