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The Psychological Portrait
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see also:
Lorenzo Lotto
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Lorenzo Lotto:
Young Man before a White Curtain
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Lorenzo Lotto
Portrait of a Man before a White Curtain
1506-10
Oil on wood, 42,3 x 35,8 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
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 Lorenzo Lotto
Portrait of a Man (detail)
The light of an oil-lamp burning in the dark room behind the curtain is
probably a biblical allusion:
"And the light shineth in darkness"
(Joh.1,5).
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More so even than Giorgione and Titian, it is Lorenzo Lotto who
should be considered the true inventor of the Renaissance
psychological portrait.78 Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice. Though
he spent many years in Bergamo, and probably entered Alvise Vivanm's
studio there, for much of his life he was restless, continually
moving from town to town. In their haste to identify the artist's
subjects with his way of life, many early historians of art found in
his work traces of the instability and restlessness ascribed to
Lotto in sixteenth-century accounts of his life. This has meant that
Lotto, to whom the authorship of only a small number of paintings
can be attributed beyond doubt, has come to be seen as the painter
of a considerable number of idiosyncratic works whose authorship
cannot finally be determined. The heterogeneous style and
subject-matter of Lotto's oeuvre thus seems to confirm the
conflicting nature of his personality.
Reference to the "psychological" portrait here should not be
understood in the modern sense of the epithet. The visual medium
chosen by Lotto to portray mental states was less one of analytical
disclosure than its opposite: enigma. His tendency to present the
spectator with riddles was intensified by his mysterious symbolism,
and by his frequent emblematical or hieroglyphic allusiveness.
Although Lotto's allusions, in their literal sense, could be
fathomed perhaps only by the "cognoscente" of his day, they are
nevertheless capable of inspiring a wealth of vivid associative
detail. This can be a source of fascination, as well as of
frustration, to the the spectator who has little access to their
original meaning.
Lotto's early portrait of a young man wearing a round black beret
and buttoned, black coat still owes much to the traditional
aesthetic of imitation. Scholars have rightly pointed to the
influence of Giovanni Bellini here. The physiognomy of "his powerful
nose and searching grey-brown eyes, which, under the slightly
knitted brow, seem to brood on the spectator, to view him almost
with suspicion" (as Friderike Klauner writes) is so faithful a
rendering of empirical detail that we are reminded of another
painter, one whose brushwork was learned from the Netherlandish
masters: Antonello da Messina. What is new here is the element of
disquiet that has entered the composition along with the waves and
folds of the white damask curtain. A breeze appears to have blown
the curtain aside, and in the darkness, through a tiny wedge-shaped
crack along the right edge of the painting, we see the barely
noticeable flame of an oil-lamp. Curtains are an important
lconographical feature in Lotto's work. The motif is adopted from
devotional painting, where it often provided a majestically symbolic
backdrop for saints or other biblical figures. Since early Christian
times, the curtain had been seen as a "velum", whose function was
either to veil whatever was behind it, or, by an act of "revelatio",
or pulling aside of the curtain, to reveal it. To judge from the
curtain which fills most of Lotto's canvas, we may safely conclude
that he intends to reveal very little indeed of the "true nature" of
his sitter. What he finally does reveal is done with such reserve
and discretion as to be barely insinuated. For the burning lamp is
undoubtedly an emblem of some kind. It may, in fact, be an allusion
to the passage in St. John: "lux in tenebris" ('And the light
shineth in darkness', Joh. 1, 5). It is interesting to note that
Isabella d'Este chose to cite this light/darkness metaphor in her
own "impresa" in 1525, altering the original to refer to her
isolation at the Mantuan court: "sufficit unum (lumen) in tenebris"
(a single light suffices in the darkness). Perhaps Lotto intended to
convey a similar message through his portrait of this young man.
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see also:
Lotto Lorenzo
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Lorenzo Lotto:
Man with a Golden Paw
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Lorenzo Lotto
Man with a Golden Paw
c. 1527
Oil on canvas, 96 x 70 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
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 Lorenzo Lotto
Man with a Golden Paw (detail)
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Like Lorenzo Lotto's Young Man before a White Curtain,
this pale, elegantly dressed, bearded man is shown before a curtain,
only this time the curtain is a deep, dark red. It fills almost half
of the painting, its fall broken by a green table, upon which the
man leaning across into the picture space rests his elbow. It is the
man's pose which lends such unease to the composition. Unlike the
enduring quality imparted by the statuesque tranquility of Lotto's
Young Man, the almost diagonal pose of this sitter
suggests transience, a fleeting revelation, an impression
intensified by the questing eyes of the sitter and his stangely mute
gestures. Whereas the hand on his chest may be interpreted as a sign
of "sincenta" - reverence, or protestation (as when one crosses
one's heart, or in the expression "mano sul cuore") - the stretched
out left hand holding the golden paw presents us with a problem. It
is difficult not to notice a latent aggression in the spread claw,
which appears to be leaping from the man's grasp. Placed as it is, a
little right of centre, this detail attracts more attention than its
small size would initially seem to warrant, an effect underlined by
the gleaming brightness of the wrought gold against the black sheen
of the man's coat. There can be little doubt that the claw is
central to the meaning of the painting. But how should it be
understood? Is it intended as an attribute referring to the sitter's
profession or social role? If so, then the sitter may be a sculptor
or goldsmith, and the paw possibly an allusion to his name. The
lion's paw might then stand for Leone Leoni (c. 1509-1590); a
medallist himself, Leoni was naturally interested in "impresa",
emblems and all kinds of allusions to names, and, for obvious enough
reasons, chose the lion's paw as his own heraldic device. Leoni
stayed at Venice in 1527 while Lotto was living there. How-ever,
these speculations amount to no more than a vague hypothesis, and
unless more light is thrown on the origin of the painting, there
seems little prospect of ever identifying the man. Attribution and
dating can be traced back to Giovanni Morelli, whose method -
attribution on the basis of details otherwise considered secondary
e.g. the depiction of the sitter's ears or ringers), but thought to
remain constant throughout an artist's "oeuvre" - cannot be allowed
to pass unquestioned.
It is not unthinkable that the paw, or claw, may be an obscure
reference to some Latin phrase which, in this context, would have
the force of a motto. The motto might be "ex ungue leonem" (to
recognize "the lion by its paw"), a synechoche employed by Classical
writers, for example Plutarch and Lucian, to refer - by metonymy -
to a painter's brushwork or signature, or "hand" in sculpture, which
immediately identifies the work of a particular master. This
interpretation of the paw would, of course, be in keeping with the
suggestion that it represents a professional attribute.
A conclusive interpretation of this painting is not possible. The
historical and aesthetic conditions of the painting's conception and
execution evidently precluded access to its meanings by more than a
limited circle of Lotto's contemporaries, a problem that makes the
painting virtually impossible to decipher today. The precept of "dissimulatio",
the demand - frequently voiced in the increasingly popular
moralizing literature of the day - that the sitter's inward world
remain concealed, or veiled, seems to have influenced its
conception. The painting shows a new page turning in the history of
the mind, a new stage of awareness of subjectivity and
individuality. Here was a dialectical response to a feeling that the
self had become all too transparent, all too vulnerable, an example
of the new tactics required by the self-assertive individual in
contemporary social hierarchies.
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Lorenzo Lotto
Portrait of a Gentleman
c. 1530
Oil on canvas, 118 x 105 cm
Galleria Borghese, Rome
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see also:
Moretto
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Moretto da Brescia:
Portrait of a Young Man
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Moretto
Portrait of a Young Man (Count Sciarra Martinengo Cesaresco)
1516-18
Oil on canvas, 114 x 94 cm
National Gallery, London
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Ridolfi records that Moretto da Brescia, whose real name was
Alessandro Bon-vicino, was a pupil of Titian, but this has never
been proved. Certainly, there can be little doubt that the Venetian
painter influenced the work of this artist, who lived and worked all
his life at Brescia. Moretto was primarily a painter of altarpieces
and other religious works, and executed only a small number of
portraits, but these, owing especially to their powers of
psychological observation, are considered, along with works by
Lorenzo Lotto, among the most fascinating examples of their genre to
be painted during the first half of the sixteenth century, as this
portrait from the National Gallery will testify.
The young, flamboyantly dressed man gazing at the spectator is a
wealthy, Italian noble. He is sitting before a brocade curtain,
which is ornamented with pomegranate and carnation designs. Or
rather - not sitting, but standing, his left hand propping him up on
the armrest of a chair. Inclining his body slightly to the left, he
rests his head on his right hand, his bent right elbow leaning on
two cushions, placed on the table especially for the purpose. This
is the typical pose and gesture of the melancholic. Melancholy, a
fashionable illness in the sixteenth century, had an important role
even in Shakespeare's plays. Here, it is expressed in a mysterious
inscription on the badge sewn on the brim of the sitter's feather
beret. On it, in Greek lettering, we read [IOY
АIAN ПOOП] (iou lian
potho). It is probably right to translate this emblematic motto as:
"Alas, I desire too much." nobles of condensing a personal pledge
into an epigrammatical phrase.
The motif of melancholy suggested by the pose and motto of the noble
gentleman in the portrait8'' is an indication of new standards of
personal achievement. Initially established by the ascendant
bourgeoisie, such standards had been brought to the notice of the
nobility by humanist scholars active at the courts. It is
demonstrable that the "too much" in the motto refers not (or rather,
less) to worldly possessions, of which the sitter evidently had no
shortage, but to spiritual riches. X-ray photographs have revealed
that an earlier version of the portrait showed books lying open on
the table in front of the sitter. In "The Anatomy of Melancholy", a
book which, although it did not appear until many years later, was
nevertheless concerned with the mental climate of the sixteenth
century, Robert Burton wrote that "too much" exposure to books, and
to the confusing contradictory opinions and theories expressed in
them, could itself bring on moods of sadness, dejection and
desperation.
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 Moretto
Portrait of a Young Man
( Count Sciarra Martinengo Cesaresco)
detail
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Albrecht Durer
Melancholia I
1514
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During the 15th century it was seen as a sign of melancholy, or
"black bile", to rest one's head, slightly inclined, in one's hand.
Melancholy had been viewed unfavourably during the Middle Ages, but
later became increasingly fashionable.
Humanists and artists,
"Saturn's children", appropriated it as their state of mind.
Among
them was Durer, who made melancholy the subject of this famous
engraving.
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