for long an accepted fact that Lotto was a pupil of Bellini, and his
earliest altarpiece, to S. Cristina at Treviso, bears traces of
Bellini's manner. A Pieta above has child angels examining the wounds
with the grief and concern which Bellini made so peculiarly his own, and
the St. Jerome and the branch of fig-leaves silhouetted against the
light remind us of the altarpiece in S. Crisostomo. Lotto seems to have
clung to quattrocento fashions. The ancona had long been rejected by
most of his contemporaries, but he painted one of the last for a church
in Recanati, in carved and gilt compartments, and he painted predellas
long after they had become generally obsolete. We ask ourselves how it
was that Lotto, who had so susceptible and easily swayed a nature,
escaped the influence of Giorgione, the most powerful of any in the
Venice of his youth--an influence which acted on Bellini in his old age,
which Titian practically never shook off, and which dominated Palma to
the exclusion of any earlier master.

It would take too long to survey the train of argument by which
Mr. Berenson has established Alvise Vivarini as the master of Lotto.
Notwithstanding that Bellini's great superiority was becoming clear to
the more cultured Venetians, Alvise, when Lotto was a youth, was still
the painter _par excellence_ for the mass of the public. In the S.
Cristina altarpiece the Child standing on its Mother's knee is in the
same attitude as the Child in Alvise's altarpiece of 1480, and the
Mother's hand holds it in the same way. Other details which supply
internal evidence are the shape of hands and feet, the round heads and
the way the Child is often represented lying across the Mother's knees.
Lotto carries into old age the use of fruit and flowers and beads as
decoration, a Squarcionesque feature beloved of the Vivarini, but which
was never adopted by Bellini.

About 1512 Lotto comes into contact with Palma, and for a short time the
two were in close touch. A "Santa Conversazione," of which a good copy
exists in Villa Borghese, Rome, and one at Dresden, with the Holy Family
grouped under spreading trees, is saturated with Palma's spirit, but it
soon passes away, and except for an occasional touch, disappears
entirely from Lotto's work.

Lotto may have had relations in Bergamo, for when in 1515 a competition
between artists was set on foot by Alessandro Martino, a descendant of
General Colleone, for an altarpiece for S. Stefano, he com