A PICTURE BY LORENZO LOTTO AT

WILTON HOUSE1

[1899: AET. 36]

MONG the pictures preserved in the famous palace of the Earls of Pembroke at Wilton, there is one which, though it bears the great name of Correggio, has hitherto escaped not only criticism but detection. Even Waagen, who visited Wilton, does not refer to it. The picture is painted on wood, and has suffered more from neglect than from restoration. It measures 16 by 13 inches. The subject is the Temptation of St. Anthony, but it is presented in a manner so original and fantastic as to leave no room for doubt that we have to deal, not with Correggio, but with an artist who for a time moved parallel to him, and so closely that he is apt to get lost in the more even splendour of Correggio's

name.

The scheme of colour with its somewhat sharply contrasted blue and white, the landscape full of sentiment and mystery, the attitude boldly conceived but feebly drawn-all this points to what the face reveals as clearly as if the artist had done what he rarely omits, and added his name, Lorenzo Lotto. The fact that Correggio and Lotto passed, so to speak, the same point, but in different directions and apparently without mutual recognition, is one of the strangest in art history, and it should dispose us to be critical, if not in

1 "Art Journal," March, 1899.

2 I have been able to find no reference to it later than that of Richardson, who writes ("Ædes Pembrockianæ," 1774): "This picture belonged to the Duke of Parma, from whom it was stolen in 1693, and a reward of 200 pistoles was offered for it. A nobleman of Venice bought it, and afterwards sold it." I owe this reference to the kindness of Lord Pembroke.

3 "The two men have so much in common that they seem to have been companions, and yet the silence of history as to their personal acquaintance is complete."-Crowe and Cavalcaselle, "Painting in N. Italy," ii, 511.

F

credulous, of the theory that would subordinate Titian, whom we see and know, as an appendix to Giorgione, whom we are too often compelled to invent.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the full freedom of the external world had already been won for art. The body with its mysteries of form and motion having been conquered, the other, deeper, side of the problem remained to be grasped. Leonardo had experimented in physiognomy, varying the balance of his lines until he reduced them to what might be called their limiting ratio for successive types of emotion; but his interest lay rather in describing the physical causes or accompaniments of mental states. Correggio and Lotto came later, and, stirred about the same time by the same subtle breath, they presented the world no longer in the old fashion, as a thing seen and recounted from point to point, but as the cause and substance, now of apprehension and protest, now of exultation and hope.' Correggio, repelled, like Shelley, by the coarseness and hardness of reality, enwrapped himself in a dream of perfection when all things should be made young-vox turturis audita est in terra nostra, surge amici et veni; while the other, too self-conscious to submit to be led, but too weak to stand alone, seems to brood for ever upon the complexities and contradictions that beset the pilgrim in a transient world.

In the solitude of a forest glen the Saint sits or rather reclines in an uncomfortably distorted attitude. The sun has set, and the powers of darkness are beginning to be abroad and busy. Absorbed in himself, like all Lotto's creations, St. Anthony seems to be making an earnest appeal to the sympathy or the pity of the spectator. Meanwhile the tempter approaches, stealthy, and unseen, in the form of a dragon, but on a small scale to suit an easy prey.

The date of the work can only be fixed approximately. I am inclined to attribute it to the period of Lotto's residence in Bergamo, about 1516, when he executed the great altarpiece of S. Bartolommeo. The attitude, which displays feebleness in the very fact of overstrain, the favourite pose of the foreshortened hand, the colour full in body but sober in key-are one and all features that recur

1

Cf. what M. Séailles says of Renan: "il a gardé l'art de peindre la nature par des traits moraux, d'en suggérer l'image par les émotions qu'elle éveille, allant non de la sensation au sentiment, mais du sentiment à la sensation." 2 Morelli, "Die Gallerien zu München und Dresden," p. 68.

again in the Predella which is now preserved separately from the altarpiece in the Gallery at Bergamo. It may be worth noticing that Palma must have hit upon a very similar model for his St. Anthony in the Church of S. Maria Formosa at Venice,' though in his case the sentiment is more manly, as the treatment is more general. The figure is probably a portrait. In any case it belongs to that tribe out of which Lotto chose most of his sitters, or into which he admitted them by some strange sort of baptism-the tribe of those for whose vanity or whose weakness the world is too strong, too complicated, or too real, who are haunted by secrets. which they are afraid or ashamed to confess or to confront, who have failed in the pursuit of hope and other phantoms on the road that leads straight from sensuality to superstition. In the National Gallery (1047) we have an unhappy family group where the lady, frankly animal and prosaic, despises and resents the constant inadequacy of her wool-gathering mate. In the Doria palace' there is a sickly-looking personage, "who seems to count the beatings of his heart"; but everywhere, in fact, it is the same story. Lotto, though to the superficial observer he may seem to have explored human character in its many-coloured phases and tortuous recesses, had no eye and no touch for the sane and the strong. In reality, like Byron, he painted a single person-himself; he uttered a single voice, that of his own aspiration and complaint. In the company of our sleek decadent we are remote indeed from the saint "whose bones rattle and stink e'en in the flesh"-from him who when the novice shrank from the very thing that under Lotto's auspices St. Anthony is here playing at, exclaimed, “Art thou afraid to lie down alone under the stars?-Christ will lie down with you." Remote even from the coarse-grained simpleton of Teniers, who is more than half inclined to welcome any interruption, even from the devil, of the difficult drudgery of spelling out the Bible; here on the contrary to be tempted is obviously to be fashionable. Our saint is cultivated, fluent, winning. He has even the air of a critic who having declared science bankrupt to the satisfaction of those who do not even know where science begins, flatters himself that he has made the devil semi-reasonable. Lotto, in a word, embodies that spirit which afterwards found work and opportunity in the counter1 Phot. Alinari, 13651.

2

Morelli, "Die Gallerien Borghese und Doria," p. 391.