LORENZO LOTTO.*
Tars is the first book in English in which the methods of analysis and comparison associated with the name of Morelli have been applied on an elaborate scale. These methods are, of course, only a more definite, persistent, and systematic application of the process that people have gone through from the beginning of time in identifying the authorship of works of art and other things ; but it has been somewhat late in the day that any one has attempted to gather up, to express exactly, and to state in convincing detail the evidence for such judgments in the field of painting. The thing was not possible so long as the look of pictures had to be borne in the memory across Europe from one gallery to another, or comparisons had to be made between engravings, with their free and inexact rendering of originals. It is the photo- graph that has made exact comparison possible between pictures and drawings, as the cast long ago made it pos- sible in the case of sculpture. With a number of photo- graphs of a master's work before one, it is not difficult to establish the existence of mannerisms and habits of drawing and composition, and of preferences for certain types; or, again, to affiliate these preferences and habits of a painter to the preferences and habits of the men on whom his style was formed. If we were to take even a modern painter like Reynolds, and compare a number of photographs after his paintings, we could readily establish some of the details of treatment that make up our vague impression of a common likeness among his portraits,—tricks like the shadow under the nose, for instance. Or even at the present day, among the painters who are supposed to follow Nature with least parti pris, we could surprise mannerisms of vision, such as the wisp. like elongated forms dear to Boldini, Sargent, Hellen, and others. This kind of evidence that can be exactly stated never of course exhausts the points of evidence that have not been formulated and yet go to make up a total impression, and the observer who only has an eye for obvious mannerisms will not go far in his investigations. But it is silly, as some writers do, to decry this kind of exact investigation because it is not something else. Like all inquiry into evidence, it requires intelligence, but the evidence is real, however trivial some of it may sound.
It is an investigation that is most easily applicable to early work, because in early work there is more that is the result of pure unthinking habit. In our time most of the features of nature have been passed under the critical eye, have been studied; and the modern pupil in art has the results of a dozen researches into nature by the methods of different schools. But the facts of nature were only successively dug out by the early painter. Expression and composition were what he aimed at first; structure engaged him later, and at first only the structure that was most expressive, that of the face. Then came the body, affecting draperies even when concealed,—the structure of trees, clouds, landscape, and later still the aspect of all these things under effects of air and light, superseding a statement of their mere anatomical structure and local colour.
Mr. Berenson, in his introduction, points to the logical way in which this order of attack affects the representation of the features of the face. The eye and the mouth get the first attention, because expression depends most upon them. On the exact drawing of the ear nothing depends for those who have never noticed it precisely ; it is therefore treated in a much less studied and more customary manner. Some one invents a " way of doing ears," as the early British water-
• Lorenzo Lotto : an Essay in ConEtructive Art Criticism. By Bernhard Be•eneon. Lend G. P. Pn'nam's Sons. 1S55.
colourist had methods for tree-foliage, and his pupils copy the trick. Any one who has studied Greek vase-paintings will notice the truth of this. In them the ear remains a rudimentary symbol after the eye and mouth have reached a passable likeness to these features. The same is true of the hand, until it begins to play a part in expression ; and even then, so difficult a task does the hand give the draughtsman that he is apt to rely on summary and customary ways of rendering it.
So much being admitted as to this minute and exact kind of evidence, it should be said at once that in Mr. Berenson we have a writer who is not a mere cataloguer of those peculiarities, but who has a sympathetic interest as well in the spirit of the artist he investigates. The evidence, stated with great patience and fullness, he devotes to establishing what are the works of the painter, and this established, he proceeds to define the place and character of their author. Not only the student of evidence will find the book in- teresting, but also the student of painting as a record of thought and feeling. I will briefly resume Mr. Berenson's conclusions under these two heads.
On the point of derivation, Mr. Berenson disentangles, with no little acuteness and patience, the relation of Lotto to the School of Alvise Vivarini. The school of the Bellini, with its brilliant pupil Giorgione and his followers, has, it appears, too much absorbed the attention of the historians of art; and the rival school has an importance in a true perspective which has become obscured. The brilliant genius of Giorgione impressed itself on most of the talent of his time, but there existed, side by side with that strong influence, this different strain. Mr. Berenson's first argument, then, is devoted to confuting the legend of the books, that Lotto was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, and to placing him in a different group from the predominating group that included Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. The argument is pursued in detail through a comparison of his paintings with those of the men with whose work his own has affinities, Jacopo di Barbari, Bonsignori, Montagna, and so on. Then the after•influences are considered,—that of Raphael while Lotto worked with him at the Vatican, that of Palma, and others. One by one, the pictures are assigned to their places in his career, for Mr. Berenson does not shun definiteness in his arrangement, nor take refuge in generality ; and the descriptions of pictures area many cases accommnied by illustrations, excellent for their purpose.
Then follows a summary of the characteristics of Lotto, based on the consideration of his work thus described in detail. It is pointed out in what ways his spirit differs from that of Giorgione and Titian, who are so commonly taken to sum up the spirit of their time, and the delicate, thoughtful nature of the man is brought into relief. On this "psycho- logical" character, Mr. Berenson perhaps insists overmuch, as in his remarks on the family piece in the National Gallery. It is easy to overread the intention of a painter, and also, it should be added, difficult to describe a nuance of character in painting without seeming to overread. The somewhat sentimental trick of a drooping head may be taken to convey too much. And yet no one who is familiar with the superb Prothonotary of our National Gallery, or the fine portrait of the antiquary at Hampton Court, will deny that in Lotto we have an observer sensitive, as few have been, to the dignity and subtleties of human expression.
Something might be said in criticism of the author's references to modern painting, his comparisons being at times a little hasty. But one welcomes the growing sense among the students of ancient art of the fact that painting is an art with a continuity of inspiration, and not an art desecrated by modern practice. Admirers of the very great master who is the subject of the book, and indeed all who are pleased to follow an argument based on evidence, will do well to read this volume. For the specialist it provides that desirable thing, a definitely stated series of conclusions, to be accepted or challenged by future inquirers.
We may mention here a little pamphlet, to which reference is made by Mr. Berenson, by another worker in the same field of Venetian painting. This pamphlet deals with the Venetian pictures at Hampton Court, is by " Mary Logan," and is published for a few pence by the Kyrie Society. It will be found a useful summary of recent conclusions as to the authorship of the pictures in that rich collection.
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