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In 1529 the painter Lorenzo Lotto complained that his mind was ‘much assailed by various and strange disturbances’. This was an unusual declaration to make in a business letter, but then Lotto (c1480–1556/7) was far from being a prosaically conventional individual. He was neurotic, driven, obsessive and possessed the imagination of a 16th-century René Magritte. His letter concerned the 68 intarsia, or marquetry, panels he designed to adorn the choir stalls of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo. These, dreamt up between 1524 and 1532, add up to one of the largest pictorial cycles of the Renaissance – and one of the weirdest.
You have to peer closely to appreciate the almost miniaturist detail of each panel, most of which are a bit under 46cm high, but what you see is encyclopaedic. Lotto’s pictures illustrate much of the narrative of the Old Testament in episodic, strip-cartoon detail, including such obscure episodes as the stories of Maccabee Woman, Elijah escaping from Jezebel, and Samson sending foxes into the standing corn. Part of the magic of these pictures, so full of light and shade, feathery foliage, rolling hills, space, perspective and city streets is that they are made entirely of little bits of wood, ingeniously pieced together. Of course, many Italian churches and palazzos boast marvellous works in inlaid wood. But none comes so close to the effects of painting.
Giovan Francesco Capoferri, the brilliant craftsman who transformed Lotto’s drawing ideas into intricate woodwork, used an alchemist’s laboratory of brews, berries and chemicals to colour, treat and varnish his materials. Some were highly toxic and may have brought about his early death.
Best of all, to my mind, are the imprese, or allegorical emblems, that Lotto originally designed as protective covers for these holy scenes. No-one with a taste for the surreal could fail to be beguiled by these. The painter had a liking for obscure symbols derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, combined with a love of visual puns (and also the ordinary kind: he decided to start work with Lot and his Daughters, because the title made a rather unflattering play on his own name). The cover for The Drowning of the Pharaoh, for example, is a fantasia on the celebrated passage from St Paul’s epistles beginning: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’. Lotto’s visualisation of this features a naked man, riding a beast that looks like a hybrid of a camel and a donkey. He is peering into a mirror and wearing a birdcage on his head, while around him dangle assorted symbolic objects, including a cardinal’s hat, a mask and a pair of cartoonishly crossed eyes.
Some of Lotto’s conceits caused bewilderment even in the 16th century. On one occasion he wrote testily to his clients, who had obviously failed to understand one of his flights of fantasy, that since these ‘do not follow any written programme, they must be interpreted by the imagination’. By that he meant he hadn’t got them from a book, but out of his own head. Therein lies much of their fascination.
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