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Lorenzo Lotto e l'Immaginario Alchemico: Le "imprese" nelle tarsie del coro della basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo - Review
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1998 by Alexander Nagel
Clusone: Ferrari, 1997. 210 pp.; 45 color ills., 40 b/w. 60,000 lire
The Lorenzo Lotto exhibition that opened in November 1997 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and that traveled to Bergamo and Paris in 1998, hailed Lorenzo Lotto as a "rediscovered master of the Renaissance." Lotto certainly has a long way to go in achieving recognition among the general populace, but among Renaissance scholars he has for some time been appreciated as one of the most engaging artists of the 16th century and, since the publication of Bernard Berenson's pioneering monograph in 1895, has attracted a sizable body of scholarship. The latest wave of book-length publications, under review here, brings together many recent findings and offers a newly integrated picture of the artist's work. Jacques Bonnet's book is the first monograph on the artist to appear in French, and the monograph by Peter Humfrey and the exhibition catalogue make a significant contribution to English-language scholarship, which since Berenson has lacked a comprehensive treatment of the artist.(1) One can almost hear the gears of canon-formation at work, slowly installing Lotto among the ranks of the major masters. In his introduction to the catalogue, David Alan Brown looks to a future when "Lotto may occupy a more central place in Renaissance art than he has hitherto been granted." One of course sympathizes with the sentiment, and yet it is worth wondering whether a central position is suited to an artist who spent most of his career devising willfully eccentric and unconventional alternatives to more classical statements. Giving Lotto the attention he deserves might, instead, lead us to ask how the very question of center and periphery took shape in the artistic culture of 16th-century Italy and, further, to ask what this question had to do with the emerging historical and regional awareness of artistic tradition that marks the period.(2) It is the sort of question that has preoccupied literary historians of the period especially since Carlo Dionisotti, and if that body of scholarship is any indication it might prove the best means of asking what connects these artistic matters to the critical religious climate of early 16th-century Italy.
The catalogue, written by David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco, follows in the best tradition of recent catalogues, offering a substantial essay on each work rather than the traditional small and all-too-often unsatisfying entry. The volume also includes essays by several respected scholars in the field on important aspects of Lotto's work, and one can only wish they were longer (they average five illustrated pages). Mauro Lucco's essay on Lotto's figurative sources is filled with valuable suggestions and confirms one's impression of Lotto's novelty in this regard. If most artists, even the most original ones, are stamped by their initial training, Lotto's training remains mysterious, and was in any case quickly superseded by an active fashioning of stylistic choices from a variety of available traditions. Lucco expands the repertoire of potential northern influences beyond the familiar references to Albrecht Durer, making apposite suggestions of Lotto's responsiveness to Matthias Grunewald, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Jan van Scorel, as well as Urs Graf, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, and Hans Leu. In a later catalogue entry on the Allentown saint Jerome (cat. no. 11), Lucco also aptly invokes Albrecht Altdorfer. Lotto's lifelong responsiveness to the art of the north helps to explain his somewhat oblique relation to the masters of the Italian High Renaissance. Lucco points out evidence of Lotto's awareness of Michelangelo and Raphael, especially in the Roman works (evidence supplemented in David Alan Brown's excellent entry on the Castel Sant'Angelo Saint Jerome, cat. no. 8), to make the important point that Lotto's avoidance of these models and their "formidable pride in the human figure" was a deliberate choice - a choice, one might add, for which the Recanati Transfiguration can stand as a manifesto. Perhaps this explains why Lotto seems consistently to have found stronger inspiration in artists at some remove from the principal High Renaissance masters and, as it were, one step closer to him: Fra Bartolommeo, not Raphael, Antonio da Pordenone, not Michelangelo. Somewhat surprisingly, Pordenone does not appear in Lucco's essay, and neither does Cima da Conegliano.
In an essay on Lotto's patrons, Louisa Matthew assembles evidence to put to rest the received view that Lotto worked for members of the artisan class and for rustic provincials. Only 20 out of 116 documented works of all types, she shows, were made for artisans. Among his altarpieces, of which only one was made for an artisan, one-third were made for confraternities, placing him, as Matthew notes, "in the mainstream of altarpiece patronage in the sixteenth century" (p. 30). She also contests the notion that Lotto's patrons living in smaller cities and towns were necessarily less sophisticated than those in larger cities, but has space to mention only a few of the more illustrious names, such as Bernardo de' Rossi, bishop of Treviso (whose portrait in Naples is in the exhibition), and Niccolo Bonafede, bishop of Chiusi, for whom Lotto painted the magnificent Crucifixion in Monte S. Giusto (sadly, not in the exhibition). A deft assessment of Lotto's activity while in Venice between 1525 and about 1532 disproves the view that Lotto lacked for commissions or that his painting was not to the taste of sophisticated Venetian clients. Throughout, Matthew is at pains to point out that Lotto left Venice most often as a result of altarpiece commissions and not because he could not hold his own in the artistic capital. She does concede, however, that Lotto was unusual in choosing to Five for years in outlying places, and that it is likely that Venice was not congenial to him, thus leaving the question somewhat open. Matthew also stops short of addressing the root of the theories she disproves, which lies of course in the unusual qualities of many of Lotto's paintings. She succeeds in closing off any recourse to facile external explanations (Lotto painted in a noncanonical way for marginal patrons), but this makes the unconventional aspects of his work, and his clients' receptivity to them, a more rather than less pressing issue. It means that the question of patronage must move from matters of production to matters of reception.
