Honor for Lotto

VENICE, a city that dreams much of the past, has staged six retrospective exhibitions of her long dead masters since 1935. Having already shown off her greatest--Bellini, Titian and Tintoretto--Venice this summer is doing homage to a lesser genius: Lorenzo Lotto. The city has gathered 121 Lottos from such faraway places as Stockholm and New York, hung them in a 16-room suite of the Doges' Palace. Its high, cool chambers, with coffered ceilings and huge chimney pieces, make almost too grand a setting for Lotto's art.

Lotto was a 16th century forerunner of Degas in France and Eakins in America. Like them, he tried to portray not just the skull beneath the skin, but also the brain beneath the skull. He was by turns humorous, analytical and bizarre, but never very bold. Instead of the grand simplicity fashionable in his day, Lotto offered narrow complexity. He was perhaps the first great "psychological painter," so of course the 20th century cottons to him.

Flesh & Florins. Puzzled by his cool, delicate style, Lotto's fellow Venitians much preferred the flesh and blood magnificence of his giant contemporary, Titian. So Lotto roamed Italy's small towns, picking up a commission for a church mural here, a portrait there. In 1554, when he was 72, Lotto turned himself and his belongings over to the Holy House at Loreto, because he was "tired of wandering." The contract provided that the monks would say prayers for him, and that he would have one florin a month "to do what he pleased with."

After his death, two years later, only specialists continued to study his art, and they saw little in him but concessions to the better-liked painters of his time. Not until 1895 did Boston's Bernard Berenson make his own reputation as an art critic by remaking Lotto's as an artist.

Chastity & Chuckles. Far from being a follower, argued Berenson, Lotto was "a personal painter at a time when personality was fast getting to be of less account than conformity." Berenson praised his humor as so delicate that in the Triumph of Chastity (opposite, top), it escapes attention. True, Aphrodite and the scared little Eros "are fleeing before the fury of a female who evidently personifies Mrs. Grundy, but their innocent looks betray their belief that she has been seized by a sudden and unaccountable madness, for which they are in no way responsible.

"If neither supremely original nor supremely powerful," Berenson concluded, "Lotto was at the least representative . . . of a very interesting minority." With delicate portraits, such as that of the young scholar (opposite, bottom), he "opens our eyes to the existence, in a time and in a country supposed to be wholly devoted to carnality and carnage, of gentle, sensitive people, who must have had many of our own social and ethical ideas, and been as much revolted by the crimes happening in their midst as we are by the horrors and scandals bursting out frequently among ourselves."

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