Introduction / The Early Years
Lotto in Bergamo / Lotto's Carpets
Pictures for Private Devotion
Lotto's Patrons
Return to Venice
The Later Years
The Later Years
From the mid-1530s until his death in 1556/1557, Lotto worked mostly in the Marches, though he returned once to Treviso and twice to Venice in the 1540s. The personal account book, which he kept from 1538 until he died, reveals his growing estrangement from the world around him. Lotto complained that he could no longer earn a living as a painter and, in 1550, he suffered the disappointment of an unsuccessful auction of his works in Ancona.
Lotto's paintings from the 1530s continue to display high-keyed color and emotion, as in the Annunciation, in the center of the room. Thereafter, his style became increasingly introspective and somber. Whereas the sitters in his earlier portraits gaze directly at the viewer, those from the later years seem lost in a private world. Lotto had always sympathized with his religious subjects, but now his response to them became even more personal and deeply felt. The culmination of this late phase is the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, perhaps his last work, painted for the basilica of Loreto. It was in that holy city, where Lotto had become a lay brother in a religious community, that his peripatetic career ended.