_Lorenzo Lotto_ (Venetian: 1480-1555). _See 699._
"Supposed," says the official catalogue, "to represent the painter,
his wife, and two children." This cannot be the case, for Lotto seems
to have had no close domestic ties. The picture is, however, full of
interest for its own sake. "The man and the woman are, it is true,
both looking out of the picture, but nevertheless the feeling we have
is that the group before us is not, as is usual in Italian family
pictures, a mere collection of portraits, but that it is composed of
people who are intimately related to each other, constantly acting
and reacting one upon the other, and that it is presented in a way
which, while giving the individuality of each, makes it hard to
think of them except as conditioned, and even determined, by each
other's presence." We may in fact find in this domestic group an
anticipation of the spirit of the modern psychological novel. "Far
from being painted as such groups usually were in Italy--a mere
collection of faces looking one like the other, but with no bond of
sympathy or interest uniting them--it is in itself a family story, as
modern almost as Tolstoi's _Katia_. 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. The artist "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." He "helps us to a truer and saner view of the
sixteenth century in Italy than has been given by popular writers from
Stendhal downwards, who too exclusively have devoted themselves to its
lurid side. Lotto's charity helps us to restore that human balance
without which the Italy of the sixteenth century would be a veritable
pandemonium." The Venetian costumes, etc. may also be noticed. The
little girl is dressed in as "grown-up" a way as her mother. On the
table is a Turkey carpet, reminding us of Venetian commerce with the
East. A Turkey carpet figures also in No. 1105.