The Masterpieces from World Museums in the Hermitage series
Lorenzo Lotto, The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with St. Catherine Carrara and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with St. Justina
17 May 2002 - 18 August, 2002

"Had Lotto's contemporaries understood the revolutionizing role that this modest opinion of an artist could play, he could have become the spiritual father of a new artistic school and the Venetian art would probably be developing in the direction of Rembrandt rather than Tintoretto. This is made evident by the example of such painters as Lotto, Caravaggio or Rembrandt who finally find themselves defeated and rejected by the society which estranges them because they were ahead of their time and their contemporaries," said the prominent 20th century Italian critic Roberto Longhi of Lorenzo Lotto.
Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) was one of the pillars of Renaissance culture in Venice where he was born. His way in art lay off the track of the great Venetians Giorgione and Titian. The decisive event in his artistic biography was an invitation from pope Julius II to decorate the pope's lodgings at the Vatican. Lorenzo Lotto combined the virtue of Venetian colors with the perfect form of the school of Rome and Tuscany with the best representatives of which he worked side by side at the Vatican.
The utmost importance he attaches to colors shows him as a master of the Venetian school. Even as he reproduces a composition already found by him, he always uses new colors. This is exactly what he did in the various versions of The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with St. Catherine. The canvas from Bergamo (1533) showed in the exhibit is the most famous of them.
The artist combined the theme of the rest on the flight to Egypt, popular in Venice since the early 16th century, with the composition of the enthroned Virgin with Saints. The Bergamo painting is treated by the master as a purely Venetian theme, lyrical chamber scene on a landscape. Lorenzo Lotto makes the highly symbolic scene (dream as the death by crucifixion, swaddling clothes as the shroud and the fig tree as the paradisal garden) look touching and humane.
The master's individual manner is in the colors emphasizing the form, which look daring, even though they are slightly faded.
Lotto's painting won recognition attested to by the numerous replicas made by the artist himself and his disciples. One of them held at the Hermitage makes a comparison of the two versions possible.
The Carrara Academy work is known since 1829. The Hermitage version was acquired almost 50 years earlier but remained in the museum's storerooms for over two centuries because it was considered a replica or copy from the Bergamo original made in Lotto's studio. Previous restorations distorted the author's original idea beyond recognition. The preliminary clearing undertaken in 1920 showed that the painting depicts St. Justina recognizable by a dagger in her breast rather than St. Catherine of other versions. The full restoration of the canvas undertaken in 1999-2001 revealed the genuine work of Lorenzo Lotto.
The Hermitage painting stands comparison with the Carrara Academy composition of which it is not a simplified version. Inclusion of St. Justina into the scene attests to the composition's independent significance. The Hermitage version may have been created earlier than that of Bergamo, as suggested by its similarity to another version from a private collection published in 1956. Only in the Hermitage version the Virgin is put into the tree shade, as Lotto did in another of his paintings, Virgin with Child and Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Thomas (1529-1530), from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Hermitage composition with St. Justina must have been created around the same time.
No doubt Lorenzo Lotto's The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with St. Justina will take its place of pride in the Venetian Renaissance painting exhibition and add a new item to the list of the master's original works.

The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with St. Catherine
1533
Larger view

The Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Holy Family with St. Justina
Larger view