LRB on Lotto

The Stubbornness of Lorenzo Lotto
Colm Tóibín

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.
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