Lorenzo Lotto

This book traces the artistic and existential story of Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556), “a painter who was not only unique in the history of Italian art, but European art as well. He was an unprecedented genius who revealed his own soul, not detached from his characters, but alive and living within them” (Zampetti 1953), the protagonist in a provincial environment consciously chosen in contrast to the attraction of the great art producing centres. Some of this artist’s greatness lay in the way he considered every individual to be not the protagonist of a story, but a distinct personality. Contrary to Titian’s faces, Lotto’s faces give us the first psychological portraits. They are not of emperors and popes, but of gentry or the upper-middle classes, artists, writers, and clergymen. Those who admire his works today cannot help but be fascinated by the totally unique artistic and human e experience, finding iridescent traces of the speed of a brush, the precision of a colour, the intensity of a gaze.