urtain of the sanctuary. The colour is
in Lotto's scarlet, light blues, and violet. He soon shows himself fond
of genre incidents, and in "Christ taking leave of His Mother" gives a
view into a bedroom and a cat running across the floor. The donor kneels
with her hair fashionably dressed and wearing a pearl necklace. In the
"Marriage of S. Catherine" at Bergamo the saint is evidently a portrait,
with hair pearl-wreathed. She kneels very simply and naturally before
the Child, and the exquisitely lovely and elaborately gowned young woman
who represents the Madonna, looks out towards the spectator with a
mundane and curiously modern air. It was probably the recognition
of Lotto's success with portraits that led to their being so often
introduced into his sacred pieces. In the one we have just noticed, the
donor, Niccolas Bonghi, is brought in, and is on rather a larger scale
than the rest, but Lotto has evidently not found him interesting. The
portraits of the brothers della Torre, and that of the Prothonotary
Giuliano in the National Gallery, inaugurate that wonderful series
of characterisations which are his greatest distinction. A series of
frescoes in village churches round Bergamo must also be noticed. They
are remarkable for spontaneous and original decoration, and may compare
with the ceremonial groups of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. Lotto's
personages, as they chatter in the market-places, are full of natural
animation and gaiety, and we realise what a step had been made in the
painting of actual life.

Owing to the unsettled state of the rest of Italy, the years
from 1530 to 1540, which Lotto spent in Venice, found that city the
gathering-ground of many of the most distinguished scholars and deepest
thinkers of the day. Men of all shades of religious thought were engaged
in learned discussion, and Lotto's ardent and inquiring temperament must
have been stimulated by such an environment. During these years, too, he
became intimate with Titian, and experimented in Titian's style, with
the result that his painting gets thicker and richer, more fused and
solid, and his figures are better put together. He imitates Titian's
colour, too, but it makes him paint in deeper, fiercer tints, and he
soon finds it does not suit him, and returns to his own scheme. His
colour is still rather too dazzling, but the distances are translucent
and atmospheric. He continues to introduce portraits. In his altarpiece
in SS. Giovanni and