LOTTO, LORENZO (c. 1480-1556), Italian painter, was born in Venice, but in the earlier years of his life lived at Treviso.
His two earliest authentic pictures, Sir Martin Conway's "Danae" (about 1498) and the "St. Jerome" of the Louvre, as indeed all the works executed bef ore 1509, have unmistakable quatrocentisque traits in the treatment of the drapery and land scape, and cool grey tonality. To this group belong the Madonnas at Bridgewater House, Villa Borghese, Naples and Sta Cristina near Treviso, the Recanati altarpiece, the "Assumption of the Virgin" at Asolo, and the portrait of a young man at Hampton Court. He was in Rome between 15o8 and 1512, when Raphael was painting in the Stanza della Signatura. A document in the Corsini library mentions that Lotto received zoo ducats as an advance payment for fresco-work in the upper floor of the Vati can, but there is no evidence that this work was ever executed. In the next dated works, the "Entombment" at Jesi (1512), and the "Transfiguration," "St. James" and "St. Vincent" at Recanati, Lotto has abandoned the dryness and cool colour of his earlier style, and adopted a fluid method and a blonde, joyful colouring.
In 1513 we find him at Bergamo, where he had entered into a contract to paint for Soo gold ducats an altarpiece for S. Stefano, completed in 1516, and now at S. Bartolommeo. From the next years, spent mostly at Bergamo, date the Dresden "Madonna," "Christ taking leave of his Mother" at the Berlin Gallery, the "Bride and Bridegroom" at Madrid, the National Gallery "Family Group" and portrait of the Protonothary Giuliano, several por traits in Berlin, Milan and Vienna, numerous altarpieces in and near Bergamo, the strangely misnamed "Triumph of Chastity" at the Rospigliosi Palace in Rome, and the portrait of Andrea Odoni at Hampton Court. To this Bergamask Period also belongs
the fine series of frescoes in the Oratorio Guardi at Trescorre, near Bergamo (1524), free and original in design. In 1526 or 2 7 Lotto returned to Venice, where Titian ruled supreme in the world of art ; and it was only natural that the example of the great master should have fired him to emulation. However, even in the Carmine altarpiece, the "St. Nicholas of Bari," which is his nearest approach to Titian, he retained his individualized, as opposed to Titian's generalized, expression of emotion. But it was only a passing phase, and he soon returned to the cooler schemes of his earlier work.
Among his chief pictures executed in Venice between 1529 and 154o are the "Christ and the Adulteress," now at the Louvre, the "Visitation" at the Jesi Library, the "Crucifixion" at Monte S. Giusto, the "Madonna" at the Uffizi, the "Madonna and Saints" at Cingoli, and some portraits at the Berlin and Vienna museums, the Villa Borghese and Doria Palace in Rome, and at the National Gallery in London. He was at Treviso (1542-45), at Ancona in 1550, the year in which he entirely lost his voice; and in 1552 he "devoted his person and all his property to the Holy Virgin of Loreto" and took up his abode with the monks of that shrine. He died in 1556.
See Vasari (Milanesi ed.) Vite ; G. Morelli, Italian Masters in German Galleries (1883) ; Italian Painters in the Borghese and Doria Panfili Galleries (1892-93) ; B. Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto (19o1).