Lorenzo Lotto: Master Painter of the Renaissance 1997-March 1, 1998; the Accademia di Belle Arti, Bergamo, April 2-June 28, 1998; the Grand Palais, Paris, October 12, 1998-January 11, 1999.
an exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., November 2,, Catalog of the exhibition by David Alan Brown, by Peter Humfrey, by Mauro Lucco
National Gallery/Yale University Press, 272 pp., $55.00
Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara Ferrara, September 26-December 14, 1998; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 14-March 28, 1999; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April 27-July 11, 1999.
an exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea,, Catalog of the exhibition by Peter Humfrey, by Mauro Lucco, edited by Andrea Bayer
Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Abrams, 312 pp., $40.00 (paper)
Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy
edited by Luisa Ciammitti, by Steven F. Ostrow, by Salvatore Settis
The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 420 pp., $50.00 (paper)
An excellent exhibition of paintings by Lorenzo Lotto left Washington last March and, after traveling to Bergamo, went to the Grand Palais in Paris, where it was finely installed. Meanwhile an equally fine exhibition, similar in its ideal size of about fifty paintings, of works by Dosso Dossi, which began in Ferrara, has recently opened in New York and it is difficult to imagine that anyone visiting either or both in any of their locations will not have found the experience an intense one—as well as unusual, almost haunting, in a way that we no longer expect when looking at sixteenth-century Italian paintings in museums and galleries.
Such a reaction is obviously due in part to the fact that these artists are less familiar than most of the great masters of the Renaissance but is surely caused also by our dawning appreciation of the genuine, but very different, idiosyncrasies to be discerned in the works of both of them. It is tempting to draw a loose parallel between the nature of their appeal to us and that of Botticelli to certain art lovers of the middle of the nineteenth century who, well before he had become immensely fashionable, were becoming aware of the fact that his pictures were of a different kind from those of the fifteenth-century Florentine painters who were once again being held up, as they had been by Vasari hundreds of years earlier, as admirable pioneers on the road to progress. Moreover, by a strange coincidence, both exhibitions raise particularly intriguing questions about the way controversial documentary evidence can affect our responses to what we like to think of as the purely visual impact made by works of art.
Beautiful as were all the paintings in the Lotto exhibition—in feeling, in color, in design—most of them seem different from the works of Giorgione, Titian, Palma Vecchio, and other Venetian masters in one very striking way. They convey an …
