Lorenzo Lotto

“ Lotto makes it evident that the sensitiveness of the man's nature has brought him to understand and condone his wife's limitations, and that she, in her turn, has been refined and softened into sympathy with him; so that the impression the picture leaves is one of great kindliness, covering a multitude of small disappointments and incompatibilities" (B. Berenson: Lorenzo Lotto, pp. 194, 227, 322) . Mr. Berenson calls attention further to the historical significance of this page from contemporary life and manners. ”

“ Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) , pupil of Alvise Vivarini, is a highly gifted but unequal painter, who was working in Venice early in the sixteenth century. He is one of the more original of the contemporaries of Titian. Much attention has recently been given to this artist, especially to his portrait work, by Mr Berenson, who gives him high, but perhaps somewhat exaggerated praise, as the first painter who sought to interpret the varying moods of the individual human soul ”

“ Lorenzo Lotto: an essay on constructive art criticism. *$2.50. Macmillan.
A reprint of a book which was first published ten years ago. It catalogs and describes Lotto’s paintings and attempts to present the man, Lotto, altho there is little material available for his re-construction. There are a large number of full-page reproductions of Lotto’s works.
“A model of systematic investigation.”
Bernheimer, Charles Seligman, ed. Russian Jew in the United States: studies of social conditions in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, with a description of rural settlements. **$2. Winston. ”

“ Both are very Giorgionesque, the “Three Ages” leaning rather towards the early manner of Lorenzo Lotto, to whom by some critics it is actually given. The “Concert” is held on technical grounds by some of the best judges rather to bear the character of Titian at the moment when the inspiration of Giorgione was strongest on him, at least so far as concerns the extremely beautiful and expressive central figure of the monk playing on the clavichord with reverted head, a very incarnation of musical rapture and yearning—the other figures are too much injured to judge. ”

“ Jacopo Palma died at Venice, in the forty-eighth year of his age. [12]
A friend and companion of Palma was the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, [13] who had imitated the manner of the Bellini for a time, and had afterwards attached himself to the manner of Giorgione, as may be seen from the numerous pictures and portraits by his hand in the houses of the Venetian gentry. In the house of Andrea Odoni is a portrait of the latter by Lorenzo, a very beautiful thing ”

“ To this great painter full justice has scarcely been done by writers on art—an omission which in recent years Morelli and still more Mr. Berenson, in his elaborate monograph, have sought to repair. Lotto led a wandering life, which took him much away from Venice; hence his pictures are comparatively little known. Again, as Sir F. Burton points out, "great versatility and remarkable impressibility are among the chief characteristics of Lotto, who certainly was possessed of genius but whose development was oscillating and affected by many influences. ”

“ What distinguishes Lotto from his more famous contemporaries is his psychological insight into character and his personal vision—his unconventionality, which is sufficient to account for the comparative neglect suffered by him when his art is placed beside the more typical art of Titian and Giorgione, the supreme expression of the character of the period. ”

“ Lotto has nothing of the Pagan quality which marks Giorgione and Titian; he is a born psychologist, and as such he witnesses to an attitude of mind in the Italy of his day which is of peculiar interest to our own. Lotto’s bystanders, even in his sacred scenes, have nothing in common with Titian’s “chorus”; they have the characterisation of distinct individuals, and when he is concerned with actual portraits he is intensely receptive and sensitive to the spirit of his sitters. ”

“ The portraits of the brothers della Torre, and that of the Prothonotary Giuliano in the National Gallery, inaugurate that wonderful series of characterisations which are his greatest distinction. A series of frescoes in village churches round Bergamo must also be noticed. They are remarkable for spontaneous and original decoration, and may compare with the ceremonial groups of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. Lotto’s personages, as they chatter in the market-places, are full of natural animation and gaiety, and we realise what a step had been made in the painting of actual life. ”

“ This mode of Lottery is presumed to have been peculiar to the Genoese, who, for their own benefit established in many continental towns commissioners, to dispose of tickets, and to pay the prizes to those who had been fortunate.
These pernicious Lotteries continued till the end of the eighteenth century, when they were almost every where abolished and forbidden. To the honour of the Hanoverian government, no Lotto was ever introduced into it, though many foreigners offered large sums for permission to cheat the people in this manner. ”

“ Lotto does not consist, like the lottery, of a fixed number of tickets and a certain number of specified prizes, but is, in fact, a mere game of chance, at which the stakes are indefinite, and is thus played. A given quantity of numbers are placed together, of which a few are only to be drawn: the adventurers then select any one or more, on which they bet any sum they think proper ”

“ The Italian’s eminently practical nature makes him utilize his dreams in “playing the lotto,” as the buying of lottery tickets is called. To dream of certain things indicates that you will be lucky and should play. The choice of the number is the chief preoccupation of the hardened lottery player. It is decided by the oddest chance,—the number on a banknote which one has lost and found again, the number of a cab which has brought one home from some delightful festivity. The number must always be associated with something lucky. ”

“ This custom descended to the festivals given by the feudal and merchant princes of Europe, especially of Italy; and it formed a prominent feature of the splendid court hospitality of Louis XIV. In the Italian republics of the 16th century the lottery principle was applied to encourage the sale of merchandise. The lotto of Florence and the seminario of Genoa are well known, and Venice established a monopoly and drew a considerable revenue for the state. ”

“ At present there are two kinds of lottery in Europe. One is called the Italian or Genoese lotto, or merely the lotto; the other is the common lottery well known in England. Of the former, which has been long proved to be attended with great deception, and must soon be universally acknowledged to be hurtful, I do not mean here to treat, but only of the latter, which at any rate may be honourable or harmless, if we do not take into account the delusion it occasions to credulous and ignorant people, by exciting hopes which have little probability in their favour. ”

“ There are, to the destruction of the savings of the poor, state lotteries all over Italy. It was considered that this demoralising gambling ought not to be kept up in the capital of the head of the church: but it was argued that a love of putting in the lottery could not be rooted out, and while Naples, Tuscany, and Venice had lotteries, the Romans would send their money to those states, if they could not be indulged at home. A Roman lottery therefore exists, and the proceeds go to keep up a house of industry. Here a number of young people are taught various trades. ”

“ In the mixture of his colours, as well as other respects, he often resembles Lotto, and if he be less animated and sublime, he is, perhaps, generally speaking, more beautiful in the form of his heads, especially in those of boys and women. ”

“ No one with a feeling for composition can doubt for an instant that Agostino was originally intended to be alone on the canvas, as he occupies all of it that a single bust ought to occupy. Morelli's inference seems thus to be well founded that Lotto, on his return from Venice to Bergamo, stopped at Padua and painted the portrait of Agostino, which he brought to Niccolo at Bergamo, who thereupon had his own portrait added.... ”

“ The lottery playing in Naples is the curse of the town. Almost every second shop is a lottery shop, and all ranks gamble from week to week. The system is not to buy a ticket, but to back certain numbers to come out. The numbers run from one to ninety, and five are drawn every week. You can play the single number, the ambo, and the terno—that is, two numbers or three, and four and five if you like. If you play the ambo you name two numbers to come out, and if you are right you are paid by the Government three hundred times your stake. ”

“ Intimacy and monumentality do not live well together. This picture was finished in 1516, the year that Titian began the Assumption. Does not the contrast show Lotto an alien in his time and a harbinger of ours? In later pictures of less monumental pretensions,—as in a Nativity, Figure 280, at Brescia, which may profitably be contrasted with Palma’s more assured version,—he attains a penetrating beauty of a morbid kind, and his sensitiveness makes him a most appealing portraitist. ”

“ It is astonishing to see how many of these little tickets a clever charlatan will sell in an hour, and principally on account of the lottery-numbers they contain. The fortunes are all the stereotype thing, and almost invariably warn you to be careful lest you should be "tradito," or promise you that you shall not be "tradito"; for the idea of betrayal is the corner-stone of every Italian's mind.
In not only permitting, but promoting the lottery, Italy is certainly far behind England, France, and America. ”

“ These lotteries are a means of ruin and demoralization in every Italian town, the lottery offices, where the winning numbers are displayed, being only less plentiful than the cafés. I believe many of the poorer people invest their savings in these "official" gambling-places, and the majority are much the worse for so doing. But the State evidently profits by this infatuation for gaming, just as the pope and the priests enrich themselves by the blind superstition of the ignorant and foolish. ”

“ The system of speculation in vogue here is far more hazardous and complicated. To any one acquainted with the German gambling-places it is enough to say, that the Papal lottery-system is exactly like that of a roulette table, with the one important exception, that the chances in the bank’s favour, instead of being about thirty-seven to thirty-six, as they are at Baden or Hamburgh, are in the proportion of three to one. ”

“ Everyone laughed. Even the people in Don Crescenzio's shop at Nunzio Corner, just beyond Carità Passage, laughed. It was really the lottery bank, No. 117, a shop usually shut from Saturday at noon till Tuesday, the crush beginning on Thursday up to Saturday at twelve o'clock.
Don Crescenzio, the lottery banker, a handsome man, with a red beard, worked there with his two lads, who were anything but lads: one, an old man of seventy, bent, half-blind, his nose always on the gambling register, made people say their lottery numbers three times, to make no mistakes, and wrote them very, very slowly. ”

“ In many respects, the lottery system may be deemed even more pernicious than ordinary gambling. It spreads a more accomplished snare; it is less offensive to decorum; it is less alarming to consciences which have not lost all sensitiveness; it numbers among its participants multitudes of those who ought to blush and to tremble for thus hazarding their own virtue, and for thus corrupting the virtues of others; it draws within its charmed circle men and women who fill up every gradation of age, and character, and fortune. ”

“ Vehement protests against the lottery and all gaming are as often uttered in Italy as elsewhere; and among them may be cited this eloquent passage from one of the most powerful of her modern writers. Guerrazzi, in the thirteenth chapter of "L'Assedio di Firenze," speaking on this subject, says, "You would in vain seek anything more fatal to men than play. It brings ignorance, poverty, despair, and at last crime.... Gambling (the wicked gambling of the lottery) forms a precious jewel in the crown of princes." ”

“ I can recall passages in etchings of those dim, night-palaces of Venice, up which the sad-lighted sea sends faint, equivocating shivers, that give me the exact sensation of lines of Loti. They rise to mind from depths of consciousness. And without volition. Now that Loti is traveling and writing of what he sees no more, and Whistler’s etching needle is stilled, there are two joys fewer in the world for me. ”

“ I will undertake to prove before all the mathematicians in Europe that the king is bound to gain one in five in this lottery. That is the secret. You will confess that the reason ought to yield to a mathematical proof?”
“Yes, of course; but how is it that the Castelletto cannot guarantee the Crown a certain gain?”
“Neither the Castelletto nor anybody in the world can guarantee absolutely that the king shall always win. What guarantees us against any suspicion of sharp practice is the drawing once a month, as then the public is sure that the holder of the lottery may lose.” ”