The Splendor Of Venice

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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A greater than Veronese remains to be mentioned, a painter who was not only a consummate craftsman but also a profound thinker. This was Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) who, unlike his great contemporaries, was Venetian born. All the others—save Tintoretto, greatly his junior—came from the mainland: Giorgione from Castelfranco, Titian from Cadore, and Cagliari from Verona.

Few painters have lived so intense a life in the spirit as Lotto; none has written so plainly as he his soul-history in his works. A true son of Venice, his youthful mind turned to Byzantium rather than to Rome for instruction and inspiration. To him Giorgione and Titian appeared as foreign intruders; their worldliness shocked him, a follower of Savonarola. Lotto began by putting the Madonna back on a Byzantine throne in the apse of the church from which the painters of the Renaissance had taken her. Ploughing his lonely furrow at Venice he had his doubts, and in 1508 he journeyed south to see what Rome and Raphael had to teach him. What he saw there roused his reforming zeal, as it had that of Savonarola. Four years later (1512) he fled from metropolitan sinfulness and took refuge in the provincial tranquility of Bergamo.

Here he possessed his soul in peace, and as though touched by the spirit of St. Francis he became reconciled to nature. No longer is the Madonna enthroned in church, but placed in the open country, where all existing things seem to praise the Creator in their beauty. Lotto became a pantheist and his message is the gospel of love. With his Venetian predecessors and contemporaries the Virgin is either soulful and humble, or aristocratic and proud; Lotto paints her richly adorned, but imbues her countenance with a beneficent and tenderly maternal expression.

In portraiture Lotto is supreme even in a great epoch. When we look at this portrait in the National Gallery of ‘The Protonotary Apostolic Juliano,’ noting through the window the wide and boundless landscape traversed by a river which winds its way to the distant sea, noting also the exquisite Flemish-like painting of the still-life accessories, as well as the grave penetrating characterization of the man, we cannot agree with Dr Muther that Lotto regards his sitters ‘unconcerned with their decorative appearance’; but we do heartily agree that Lotto shows us people ‘in their hours of introspection.’

Why is it that Lotto, as a portrait-painter, strikes chords which, as Dr Muther says, ‘are echoed in no other Italian work.’ The explanation is this: ‘Only those whom he loved and honored were invited into his studio, and his circumstance alone differentiates his portraits from those of Raphael or Titian.’

Though never such a great figure in his day as Giorgione, Titian, or Tintoretto, Lotto was not without influence on his contemporaries. One who felt it and gained by it greatly was a painter who came from Brescia to Venice, Giambattista Moroni (c.1520-78). His ‘Portrait of a Tailor,’ is full of human sympathy and almost perfect in craftsmanship. It is deservedly one of the most popular portraits in the National Gallery, and many of us feel almost equally drawn to Moroni’s other great portrait at the National Gallery, ‘An Italian Nobleman’. Together they prove that, like Lotto, Moroni could extend his sympathies to sitters irrespective of their rank or position in life.

It is not easy to over-estimate the abundant excellence of portraiture in sixteenth century Venice. Just as the wealth and power of her merchant-citizens were the source of the success of the republican State of Venice, so the luxury they were able to afford drew to the island city of the Adriatic all the artistic talent born on the neighboring mainland. Of the multitude of artists who during this century were adorning the public buildings and private palaces of Venice, only a few of the most celebrated can here be enumerated. Cima came from Conegliano to Venice in 1492, and worked there till 1516 or later, carrying on in his Madonnas the tradition of Giovanni Bellini. Vincenzo di Biagio, known as Catena, was born at Treviso about 1470 and died at Venice in 1531. He was greatly influenced by Giorgione, to whom was once ascribed the beautiful painting ‘A Warrior adoring the Infant Christ,’ which the National Gallery catalogue now gives definitely to Catena. Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485-1547), who about 1510 left Venice for Rome, where he was influenced by Raphael and Michael Angelo, has a special interest for us because his picture ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ was the beginning of the National Gallery collection. It is still ‘Number 1’. Palma Vecchio (1480-1528) was born near Bergamo, but came to Venice while still a student. Influenced first by Bellini and Giorgione, afterwards by Titian and Lotto, he very nearly reached the first rank, as his ‘Venus and Cupid,’ now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge amply proves. He is called Vecchio (=Old) to distinguish him from a later painter Palma Giovine (1544-1628) or Young Palma.

Jacopo da Ponte (1510-92), called Bassano from his birthplace, is also splendidly represented in the National Gallery by ‘The Good Samaritan,’ a painting which used to belong to Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is a magnificent example of vigor and muscular action.

In the art, as in the State of Venice, the spark of life lingered long. So late as the eighteenth century, Longhi, Canaletto, and Guardi painted delightfully her canals and palaces and the life of her public places, while Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), painting in the tradition of Veronese, earned for himself the proud title ‘the last of the Old Masters.’

But with Tintoretto the last great word of Italy had been spoken, and when he died in 1594 it was left to the artists of other lands to take the tale.