VII.vii. Lorenzo Lotto

"Not wanting to wander further in my old age, I wanted to leave my soul in this sacred place."
- Lorenzo Lotto

Almost a recluse, Lorenzo Lotto assigned himself to obscurity by working in the Marche. For hundreds of years his reputation remained obscure, though now his genius has been resurrected. The Lotto route takes the traveler inland from the sea to a variety of out of the way towns that happen to house some of the painter's exquisite, quasi-forgotten masterpieces. The history of art is a gamble, and poor old Lotto lost out, at least until recently. Art historians can now rent cars and travel to see his various paintings, so they have amended their texts accordingly. I had been yearning to see Lotto's paintings for a long time, but I took the bus.
    Le Marche seem unusually, if not eerily, laid back for a place that was once an important cultural centre. The area was never dominated by one power centre, as the Veneto or Tuscany came to be. Its uniqueness lies in its natural receptivity to outside influence, a sort of cultural sponge halfway between Venice and Rome, Tuscany and the Adriatic. Urbino, wealthy but never overwhelmingly powerful, really had no native culture of its own, so it imported. Lotto was from Venice, though he, like the region where he spent the most productive years of his life, was never quite comfortable with the mainstream, and his eccentric style is either loved or hated.
    In Recenati, on my first stop, I crossed a priest in the street who asked me, apparently sensing I was not a local, where I was from. "Canada," I said.
    "Wonderful, wonderful. What town are you from in Norway?"
    "Canada…"
    "Yes, Canada. What town?"
    "Toronto."
    "Yes. I once knew a priest from Canada… François. And what brings you here to Recenati? "
    "I'm going to see the Lorenzo Lotto paintings."
    "Ah yes. Do you know that Lotto was a mystic, a great religious man?"
    "Yes, I know."
We continued to talk for a few minutes, but then he said he ought to be on his way to give mass. It was, after all, a Sunday morning.
    From Recenati I moved on to Loreto, the place where Lotto spent his last days in the care of monks, writing in his extraordinarily preserved journal that he wanted to die there. This small hilltop town, plainly visible from the sea, has the distinction of sheltering the Santa Casa, a humble brick house where the Virgin Mary once lived. According to legend, the house was brought from Nazareth by angels who, fearing for its security, finally deposited it in a laurel grove. The legend can be disputed, but recent investigations concluded that this is indeed, brick by brick, a first century B.C. house from Palestine, painstakingly disassembled from its original location and brought here, somehow, in the thirteenth century. Its foundation still exists in Nazareth and matches the structure exactly. As it stands now, the tiny brick room in Loreto is towered over by a magnificent marble basilica, in a typically powerful act of exalting the most divine of things. Still a major pilgrimage sight, crowds of visitors come to stand in the diminutive room where, on a certain day in March an Angel caught a local girl off guard.
    Back in Ancona, one of Italy's most important Adriatic ports, I climbed the Guasco hill, topped by a pristine Romanesque cathedral, to get a view of the ever-busy dockyards below. In a café where I stopped to have a quick lunch of brodetto, a thick seafood soup, a group of Greek truck drivers were having an animated discussion, perhaps unaware that their ancestors had founded this place where they now seem so foreign. Ancona was established by Greeks from Syracuse, and its name is derived from their word for elbow, a reference to the abrupt peninsula that juts out from the sandy Adriatic coastline that is otherwise unbroken for hundreds of kilometers.
    My last stop of the day before returning to Bologna, and perhaps the highlight, was Jesi, a small hilltop city all but forgotten by tourists. Rough and refined at the same time, Jesi was formerly the capital of a small state, and a few jewels of somewhat incongruous architecture point to its lost status. The Castelli di Jesi, eighteen properties once under the town's control, are today renowned for producing Verdicchio, a crisp white wine. I treated myself to a glass of it with my dinner of Vincisgrassi, a local layered pasta dish that is both hearty and delicate, sold on stands in the main street that straddles the ridge over which the town is built.
    But more than Jesi's bustling Sunday evening street scene, famous theatres, or typical cuisine, Lotto's paintings beckoned me here. In a little pinacoteca, unfrequented as any other of the countless museums I had visited that weekend, are six of his paintings, and among them what is unquestionably his most beautiful work, the Trial of Saint Lucy. The painting shows the tribulations of an achingly beautiful and steadfast girl in a yellow dress and red shawl, the idea of virtue herself, condemned to death by the governor Paschasius. Staring the governor straight in the eye with one finger raised in defiance, she swears her loyalty to God and becomes immovable despite the efforts of three young men who forcibly try to displace her. In a beautifully poetic counterweight, we see an African wet-nurse holding back a child eager to run into the crowd. Below the main scene, Lotto shows the events that follow with an underappreciated stroke of genius. Lucy is eventually tied to dozens of bulls in an effort to move her, but even this fails. Eventually, she is burnt alive, still unmoved, still staring ahead with her clear blue eyes, unforgettable in the tiredness and twilight of the closing day.



A Folk Festival in the main street of Loreto


The main square and Basilica in Loreto


A view of the port city of Ancona, from the Duomo


Lorenzo Lotto's depiction of the Trial of Saint Lucy