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So where do we stand with Lorenzo Lotto?

"So where do we stand with Lorenzo Lotto?", mused Pietro Zampetti in his introductory address to the conference in Asolo (18-21 September 1980) held to mark the artist's quincentenary.
The Asolo conference was an important event, as evinced by the proceedings edited by Vittorio Sgarbi and Pietro Zampetti and published, with praiseworthy timeliness, less than a year later. Some sixty scholars addressed the conference in this city in the Veneto region that hosts one of the finest of Lotto's youthful altarpieces. Their number included Bernard Aikem, Carlo Volpe, Sylvie Beguin, Philip Pouncey, Augusto Gentili, Lionello Puppi, Cecil Gould, Terisio Pignatti, Jòsef Grabski and Carlo Bertelli, to name but the best known amongst them.

An exhibition entitled "Lorenzo Lotto in the Marche. His Time, His Influence" opened in Ancona in the summer of 1981, split between the Church of the Gesù, San Francesco alle Scale and the Loggia dei Mercanti. In this instance, too, the man who masterminded the initiative, together with Fine Art Superintendant for the Marche Paolo Dal Poggetto, was Pietro Zampetti.
Pietro Zampetti is the art historian who accompanied Lorenzo Lotto throughout the 20th century, familiarising a cultured audience with his work through exhbitions which, in turn, inspired and increased the study of the painter, from the pioneering exhibition in Ancona in 1950 at which were displayed some of the most fascinating and, at the time, totally unknown works by Lorenzo Lotto in the Marche, to the memorable exhibition of 1953 in the Doges' Palace in Venice. It is worthwhile also recalling that 1953 was the year which saw the publication of monographs on Lotto by Anna Banti and Luigi Coletti.
It is arguable that Lotto, in the modern era, owes Zampetti almost as much as he owes to Bernard Berenson, who penned his crucial essay on the painter in 1895 at the age of 30. We may still wonder today - this remains one of the providential mysteries of artistic historiography - what on earth can have come over a young Lithuanian scholar educated at Harvard to prompt him to concern himself with an artist virtually unknown at the time, sending him on intrepid journeys that took him to the remotest churches of Lombardy, the Veneto and the Marche as he slogged his way on foot through the ancestral countryside of late 19th century Italy.

The convention in 1980 opened up the entire gamut of problems connected with Lotto, from his ties with Dürer and northern European graphic art, to his presence in Rome on the Vatican building site at the time Raphael was in charge of it, to his encounters and stylistic brushes with Pordenone, Correggio and Titian. An unconfessed Lutheran for some, an orthodox Catholic for others, everyone agreed at least that he was a man moved by genuine, deep-seated piety.

Part of his attraction ultimately lay also in the fact that his life struck a chord in our modern sensibilities. People were fascinated by his restlessness, his perennial homelessness, his wandering through remote villages and parishes far from the hub of mainstream activity, his marginal and eccentric commissions, and his withdrawal to the Holy House of Loreto as a lay brother in his declining years, "alone, without loyal help or solace, and sorely troubled in his mind".

After the conference of 1980, after all the studies, the research, the restorations and the works purchased over the ensuing thirty years, Pietro Zampetti's question is still appropriate: "So, where do we stand with Lotto?" In February 2011 we can answer that question by saying that we stand in the presence of a major monographic exhibition curated by Giovanni Villa for the Scuderie del Quirinale, illustrating and documenting the artist's life and works to perfection. In distilling and condensing the huge mass of scholarship produced to date, and in selecting and collecting together all of Lorenzo Lotto's most significant works, Giovanni Villa has succeeded in pulling off a major undertaking that bears comparison only with the exhibition in Venice in 1953. More than half a century has gone by since then and a great deal has changed in the realm of art history, but during that time recognition of Lotto's genius has simply gone from strength to strength in the fullness of its dazzling brilliance.

Today we know - and the exhibition will provide splendid confirmation of this - that the painter who, in his later years, was to produce the almost spectral Presentation of Christ in the Temple in Loreto, has earned his rightful place in the galaxy of the great Italian masters of the Cinquecento.


Antonio Paolucci
(Chairman of the Scholarly Committee of the Scuderie del Quirinale)