Lotto’s music and the preeminence of the Northern Schools
As we will see, the presence of instruments and scores is rare in an oeuvre that questions form and expression with an absolutely personal fervour. There are few angel musicians or even isolated musical instruments in his compositions, despite the painter’s erudite predilection for symbolism. In fact, music is not as dominant with Lotto as it is with Giorgione, Titian, or Caravaggio, the latter whose scores are not only identifiable but readable, and whose lutes and violins are realistic. Lotto’s use of instruments in his works is uninventive and iconographic. The following examples illustrate this: the two infant musicians at the foot of the Virgin Mary in the Recanati Polyptyque (Recanati, Pinacoteca Municipale); his first religious chef-d’oeuvre, painted two years after the Louvre’s Saint Jerome, in which the recorder and panpipes are used as an emblem of virtuous culture in the allegory painted on a closing panel in the Portrait of Bishop Bernardo de’ Rossi (Washington, National Gallery); and the musical nudes of Madonna with Child (Bergamo, church of San Spirito), with its angel musicians and singers squeezed together.
If we analyze the theme of his paintings, two points stand out. First, Lotto continued the tradition of altarpieces, a religious genre that knew its greatest success in the northern Italian cities of Treviso, Bergamo, and the Marches. Second, Lotto’s art as a realist painter intensified, a preference that led him to become a portrait painter. Lotto’s production of altarpieces coincides with his contemporary Adrian Willaert’s role as the first reformer of Venetian music. Born in 1490, Willaert died in Venice in 1562. To a certain extent, both opened the way for aesthetic baroque. Right up to their final works, their penetrating art marked the deep religious crisis of the 17th century, visible in Willaert’s contemplation of the spatial configuration of the San Marco basilica, in particular its centered blueprint. It was Willaert who invented the principle of cori spezzati, a separated chorus speaking to one another beneath the basilican archways, crystallizing the notion of a multi-chorus—symbolic of Venetian sacred music from the 16th to the 17th centuries. As for Lotto, we owe to him his enormous experience as an artist of altar paintings (one-third of his production) who favoured the evolution of the Renaissance polyptych toward altar paintings and the future of baroque retable specific to Counter Reform art.
Each attests to the aesthetic predominance of the Northern schools. If, in Lotto’s oeuvre, the presence of German masters such as Dürer and Grünewald is well known, Willaert (who was born in Bruges and was choirmaster in San Marco, one of Europe’s most prestigious institutions at the time) underscores the undeniable Northern blossoming in Italy. With Josquin Desprez and Roland de Lassus, all of musical Europe in the 16th century was dominated by the Franco-Flemish. Italy was no exception. Even in the madrigal genre, a form to which the Italians later took revenge, the Franco-Flemish Obrecht, Verdelot, Arcadelt, and Jacques de Wert, preceded by Cipriano de Rore, Marenzio, Gesualdo, then Monteverdi held sway, as we will see later.
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