Studio: international art (5.1895)

Lorenzo Lotto

During the rest of Lotto's life, from the National
Gallery double portrait of 1515 to the artist's
death in 1556, we are able to trace almost from
picture to picture a steady advance in expressiveness,
in which the means of expression went hand in
hand with the message he had to express. His
spirit shows itself sensitive, brooding, intensely
religious in a personal way, and full of sympathy
for all the more refined and subtle moods of the
human soul.

During his prime, from 1518 to 1528, when he
seems to have been happily situated in Bergamo,
Lotto's pictures have " an exuberance, a buoyancy,
a rush of life which find utterance in quick move-
ments, in an impatience of architectonic restraint,
in bold foreshortenings, and in brilliant, joyous
colouring .... but the psychological interest is
never absent, never wholly pushed out of sight by
the most joyous of feelings." In sacred subjects
as well as in portraits, " he seems never to have
painted without asking himself what effect a given
situation must have on a given character." Lotto
left Bergamo before he was fifty, and in the next
ten years attained some of his highest achievements
—" works retaining much of the health and blithe-
ness of the Bergamask time, but of larger scope
and deeper feeling." From the profoundly religious
spirit of many of these pictures Mr. Berenson
draws the inference, which appears to be well-
founded, that Lotto, during the repeated visits to
Venice which he is known to have made just at
this time, came into close contact with some of
the Italian Reformers who were then crowding
Venice. His biographer finds in this the explana-
tion of Lotto's suddenly deepened sense of religion,
and the almost evangelical familiarity with the
Bible displayed in his representations of sacred
events. In these, he goes on to say, "psychology
and personality mingle to a wonderful degree.
. . . . He interprets profoundly, and in his inter-
pretation expresses his own personality, showing
at a glance his attitude toward the whole of life."
These two notes—psychology and personality—
are, in fact, Lotto's distinguishing characteristics—
" a consciousness of self, a being aware at every
moment of what is going on within one's heart and
mind, a straining of the whole tangible universe

through the web of a sensitive personality.....

This makes him pre-eminently a psychologist, and
distinguishes him from such even of his con-
temporaries as are most like him: from Diirer,
who is near him in depth ; and from Correggio,
who comes close to him in sensitiveness. The most
constant attitude of Diirer's mind is moral earnest-
66

ness ; of Correggio's, rapturous emotion ; of Lotto's,
psychological interpretation—that is to say, interest
in the effect things have on the human conscious-
ness."

The pictures of Lotto's extreme old age, where,
as his physical energy flickered lower and lower, the
real fond of the man's nature appeared more and
more undisguised, do but deepen the impression
already received from the whole body of his work.
He remains to the last " a psychologist, using
psychology not for its own sake, but as an instru-
ment with which to give a finer interpretation of
character than was given by any of his contem-
poraries ; as a means of drawing closer to people,
of looking deeper down into their natures; as a

THE "MAGPIE AND STUMP " FRONT ELEVATION"