Art: An Enchanting Strangeness

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It seems improbable that, by now, there could be such a creature as a great but little-known 16th century Italian painter, but so it is--at least in America--with Lorenzo Lotto (circa 1480-1556). The current show of 51 of his paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, co-curated by art historians David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, is actually the first ever held in the U.S. It can't pretend to give a full view of Lotto, the bulk of whose work consisted of some 40 altarpieces in various towns in northern Italy--Bergamo, Recanati, Jesi. Neither these nor the masterpiece of his religious work, the powerful, almost neurotically emotive Lamentation, circa 1530, in Monte San Giusto, could be lent, and the result is a view of Lotto more skewed to his secular paintings--portraits, allegories and so on--than one might ideally have wished.

But never mind. It's a delicious and intelligently presented exhibition, almost perfect of its kind, and completely free of the depressing curatorial gimmickry that American museums so often go in for these days. It sets before you a sparsely documented man of whom enough will never be known: a devout religious painter who lived through a time of doctrinal crisis in the church, which left visible marks on his already self-reproachful and even morbid personality; a link between the exaggerated graces of Botticelli (who died when Lotto was around 30) and the learned artificialities of Mannerism; an Italian who saw the point of Netherlandish art and Hieronymus Bosch along with Germans like Altdorfer and, especially, Durer, not long after Durer himself was being changed by Venice.

Because Lotto was away from Venice in the first 20 years of the 16th century, he missed the "painterly" pictorial revolution that was going on there, which is why his work can look a bit liny and (relatively) old-fashioned, closer to Giovanni Bellini than to young Titian. Drawing creates more of his pictorial structure than color does; yet he was a marvelous colorist, suave, moody at times, and capable of a mysterious lyricism that reminds you of Giorgione, his senior by only a few years. Except that the color goes to extremes: icing-green, purple, sky blue and orange, oddly predicting the dissonant colors of Mannerism.

Today it is Lotto's strangeness that enchants--or, more precisely, the way he assimilates strangeness into naturalism. The show includes what must surely be the most peculiar image of the Annunciation ever painted. We're looking into the Virgin's chamber. She is in the foreground, looking girlish and distraught, facing you and throwing up her hands as though she were appealing for help. And why not? The angel, bearing the news that God has just impregnated her (you can see God in the background, as invasive and patriarchal as could be), seems to have fairly burst into the room. A cat, scared witless by the angel's irruption, bounds away, back arched--you can almost hear it hiss. The painting is funny and reverent, gawky and vernacular and dreamlike, all at the same time. Hence its modern appeal.