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The most famous amateur was Bernardo Rossi, Bishop of Treviso, where the painter experienced his earliest success. There, an intense intellectual activity reigned, fostered in part by the thriving publishing industry, and to which Lotto perhaps owed his own close attention to the nuance of ornamentation and the special taste for hidden meanings that adorn his best portraits. Treviso was a fertile center of Humanism, where a strong Neoplatonism thrived and where Marsilio Ficino edited his translations from the Greek. Francesco Colonna, a monk from Treviso, authored The Dream of Poliphilo, a virtual Bible for 16th century humanists that was published in Venice in 1499. During his Treviso period Lotto was also immersed in the passion for an intellectual esotericism to which Bernardo Rossi, owner of an important private library, lent all his brilliance. Lotto’s portrait of Rossi (Naples, National Gallery of Capodimonte) marks the apotheosis of the beautiful Venetian style. Here, Lotto draws from the cold, skilled style of Antonello da Messina, framing his subject in a tight, almost close-up style, to which he adds Dürer’s structural tension. In this remarkable period, the painter’s technical prowess is concentrated on portraying men of letters, such as the Young Man with Lamp (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) for which Broccardo Malchiostro is the presumed model. The lamp in the title of the painting, which is actually hardly perceptible, lends all its meaning to a show of technicality, the flame an emblem of the precariousness of the human condition and the fragility of life.
During his stay in Bergamo, from 1513-1523, Lotto painted portraits of renowned persons and allegories of marital fidelity that prepare the way for the great portraits of his mature period at the end of the 1520s, when the painter was forty years old. Also in 1527, when Willaert was attaining the most prestigious post that a musician could hold in Venice, Lotto, returned to the city and painted two superb portraits. They are as perfect as they are different through their touch, technique, spirit, and conception: The Gentleman in his Study and Andrea Odoni. The Gentleman in his Study is of a dark precision, subtly melancholic; Andrea Odoni, on the other hand, dazzles with the opulence of a heavenly luminescence. The creation of these two masterpieces within such a short period of time is an astounding accomplishment.
The Gentleman in his Study (also called “with a Lizard,” Venice, Accademia), is a cold analysis of a person deceived by love. It has been suggested that the meaning of the lizard can be found in the family coat of arms of Federico Gonzaga, where the lizard signifies the disillusion of a betrayed lover. The scattered rose petals speak of the fleetingness of love’s pleasure, the fickleness and inevitable death of love itself. Has this melancholy man renounced the pleasures of this world, to dedicate himself only to the account book he is consulting?
Deception, failure, trials and hardship in life led to a withdrawal into solitude, related to the painter’s own sensibility. There is in this painting both cynicism and refinement. Lotto’s secular paintings describe a universe shared by the 16th-century Flemish madrigal composers domiciled in Italy. Those composers’ refreshing work, done at the same time as Lotto’s last paintings (1550 onwards), reveal decidedly innovative accents: especially when, in 1555, Philippe de Monte and Lassus published their collections of madrigals. Looking and listening to the madrigals of Jacques Arcadelt also allows us a particularly interesting glimpse of Lotto’s musical environment. Simple and nostalgic, Arcadelt’s art of the madrigal consolidates, in the 1550s, an early poetic classicism, where melodic fluidity takes priority over the musical illustration of the poems. Jacques de Wert, musical director and composer in Mantua, provides examples of the final style of the Italian madrigal: a personal expressiveness that sets the stage for Gesualdo. Though still working within polyphony, he prepares us for the search for clarity by the future Florentine Camerata. His Book VII, which appeared in 1581, is rich with a sophisticated counterpoint that does not, however, exclude powerful expressive passages.
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