Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice around 1483. He belonged to the same world, therefore, as Titian and Giorgione. Despite the fact that he was a native of the city, however, which they were not, he never became a fully fledged Venetian as they did. By 1503 his name is recorded in legal documents in Treviso as a painter; he also worked in the towns of Recanati and Jesi. In 1509 there is a note that he received payments from the Papal Exchequer for work in the Vatican. (His work did not please the pope and was destroyed within a few years.) In 1513 he undertook to paint frescoes of the life of St Catherine at Bergamo and there is evidence of his activity as a painter there until 1525, when he returned to Venice. There are a number of other documents showing that he was in Venice in 1533, when he made a will, in 1540, in 1545 and in 1548, having spent the intervening periods in Treviso and elsewhere in the Marches. In 1554, he entered a religious community as a lay brother in Loreto and died there a few years later.

LRB 8 April 2010 | PDF Download