Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto was one of the most inventive and idiosyncratic artists of the 16th century and a serious rival of Titian and Palma Vecchio. This portrait was attributed to Giorgione in early inventories and to Titian in 1818. The attribution to Lotto, made in the later 19th century, is now widely accepted. Restoration has revealed that the portrait has the clarity of Lotto’s work: for example, in the way in which the colour of the sitter’s paler moustache contrasts with his darker hair, and the tactile effect of the soft, full pleats of his silk doublet, which he wears over a white chemise. The technique is not as rigidly precise as Lotto’s early portraits, such as the Bishop Bernardino de’ Rossi of c.1504-5 (Capodimonte, Naples) and the Young man with the lamp of c.1506 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The near-frontal view of the sitter’s face has been compared with Lotto’s Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his son Niccolò (National Gallery, London), dating from c.1513-16 when longer hair was in fashion.

In this portrait, the intensity of Lotto’s typical frontal pose is softened by the gentler contours of his mature style. Moreover, the sitter is not actually confronting the viewer entirely frontally: his face is slightly tilted to the left, with his left eye larger than his right and his left ear more visible.

Albrecht Dürer visited Italy in 1494-5 and again in 1505-7, and there has been much debate about the exchange of influence between Italian and northern European artists. Pope-Hennessy suggested that Lotto had seen Dürer’s Self-portrait of c.1500 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) when he painted this portrait, because it shows a more advanced use of light and shade than his earlier full-frontal portraits such as his Portrait of a youth (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo) and the Portrait of a youth (Uffizi). The other full-frontal portrait by Dürer is that of Oswolt Krel (1499; Alte Pinakothek, Munich). However, although Lotto knew Dürer’s work, particularly his prints, he could not have seen these particular paintings. There was already a strong tradition of full-frontal portraiture in northern Italy, as seen in the work of Antonello da Messina and Alvise Vivarini, before the arrival of Dürer; Lotto’s use of the full-frontal pose here, which gives this portrait such focused intensity, does recall Dürer’s work but with a Venetian softening of contours. This precision and immediacy create an image far removed from the aristocratic reserve of Titian’s sitters; these characteristics were taken up by later Lombard artists, such as Giovanni Battista Moroni.

Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007