Lorenzo Lotto: "Greatest Venetian Painter after Titian"

From David Alan Brown, Italian Renaissance painting curator at the National Gallery of Art, Peter Humfrey art history professor at St. Andrew’s University, and Mauro Lucco art history professor at the Università di Bologna:

Hailed as the greatest Venetian painter after Titian, Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1556) is known for a delightfully idiosyncratic artistic vision that has had special appeal for twentieth-century sensibilities. This book—which discusses Lotto’s life and work—explores the way his formal and iconographic experiments set him apart from the mainstream culture of his time.

The volume describes and reproduces paintings in most of the genres in which Lotto worked, including devotional paintings, altarpieces, portraits, and mythologies. These are arranged in chronological order from his beginnings as a pupil of Giovanni Bellini through the brilliant work of his maturity on which his reputation was based, to the end of his career in a religious community on the Adriatic coast. Focusing on his autograph paintings, the book presents such masterpieces as Saint Jerome in the Wilderness and Portrait of Andrea Odoni. The authors—David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, Mauro Lucco, and other eminent scholars—draw on a large number of original documents, including Lotto’s will, his letters to a confraternity in Bergamo, and his meticulously kept account books. They discuss not only Lotto’s biography and inspiration but also his mastery of allegory, his possible sympathy with the Protestant Reformation, the patrons of his altarpieces, and the so-called Lotto carpets.

This beautiful book is the catalogue for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, d.c., that will run from 2 November 1997 to 1 March 1998.

Lorenzo Lotto: Getty Museum

From the Getty Museum:

Lorenzo Lotto

b. about 1480 Venice, Italy, d. 1556 Loreto, Italy
Painter
Italian

Active in Treviso, Bergamo, and Ancona, Lorenzo Lotto spent much of his life in the provinces, where the portraits and religious paintings he specialized in often commanded higher prices than he would have received in his native Venice. According to biographer Giorgio Vasari, Lotto trained in Giovanni Bellini's studio along with Giorgione and Titian. Lotto, however, always remained somewhat apart from the dominant Venetian artistic traditions and explored a variety of painters' styles. He assimilated the work of northern Italian artists like Titian and northern European artists like Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein, as well as Raphael, with whom he worked in Rome on the Vatican apartments in 1508.Lotto's highly individual Mannerist style conveys devotion, humanity, interest in states of mind, and, more than his contemporaries, what was considered at the time to be an old-fashioned interest in capturing real-life appearance. Not surprisingly, he was a gifted portraitist: his three-quarter-length portraits were innovative, bold in design, and moody in atmosphere. Lotto made the unusual choice of painting in a horizontal format, which allowed him to develop ornamental patterns. In 1550 he lost his voice and part of his eyesight. He settled in a monastery at Loreto and became a lay brother in 1554.

Harvard Link to NASA ADS Article Regarding Lorenzo Lotto

From Dirk Robinson and David D. Stork:

Aberration analysis of the putative projector for Lorenzo Lotto's Husband and wife: image analysis through computer ray-tracing

Robinson, Dirk; Stork, David G.

Computer Image Analysis in the Study of Art. Edited by Stork, David G.; Coddington, Jim. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 6810, pp. 68100H-68100H-11 (2008).

A recent theory claims that the late-Italian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto secretly built a concave-mirror projector to project an image of a carpet onto his canvas and trace it during the execution of Husband and wife (c. 1543). Key evidence adduced to support this claim includes "perspective anomalies" and changes in "magnification" that the theory's proponents ascribe to Lotto refocusing his projector to overcome its limitations in depth of field. We find, though, that there are important geometrical constraints upon such a putative optical projector not incorporated into the proponents' analyses, and that when properly included, the argument for the use of optics loses its force. We used Zemax optical design software to create a simple model of Lotto's studio and putative projector, and incorporated the optical properties proponents inferred from geometrical properties of the depicted carpet. Our central contribution derives from including the 116-cm-wide canvas screen; we found that this screen forces the incident light to strike the concave mirror at large angles (>= 15°) and that this, in turn, means that the projected image would reveal severe off-axis aberrations, particularly astigmatism. Such aberrations are roughly as severe as the defocus blur claimed to have led Lotto to refocus the projector. In short, we find that the projected images would not have gone in and out of focus in the way claimed by proponents, a result that undercuts their claim that Lotto used a projector for this painting. We speculate on the value of further uses of sophisticated ray-tracing analyses in the study of fine arts.