Lorenzo Lotto

From Peter Humphrey, professor of Art History at St. Andrews University:

Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480-1556/7) painted some of the most startlingly beautiful as well as the most puzzling and moving works of the later Renaissance. In this generously illustrated account of Lotto's life and work, Venetian Renaissance art authority Peter Humfrey offers the first comprehensive treatment of Lotto in English since Berenson's pioneering study published one hundred years ago. Humfrey draws on the large body of Lotto's extant work as well as on sixteenth-century documentation on the artist's life, including his letters, account book for the years 1538-56, and will.

Lotto first practiced as a painter in the town of Treviso, but during his long and restless career he also spent periods in Bergamo and the Marches, as well as in Venice itself. He spent his final, lonely years at Loreto, where he died as a lay brother in a religious community. Humfrey examines the way in which Lotto responded to the work of a wide range of artists, from Giovanni Bellini and Albrecht Dürer to Raphael and Titian, but also emphasizes the painter's marked stylistic individuality, even idiosyncrasy. Particularly attractive to twentieth-century viewers are Lotto's portraits, the psychological penetration of which reveal a personality exceptionally finely attuned to the thoughts and emotions of his fellow human beings. The artist emerges as one of the most engaging and distinctive personalities of Italian Renaissance art.