LORENZO LOTTO VS. GEORG LEMBERGER. UNA STORIA D’INVENZIONE

Abstract

Lorenzo Lotto vs. Georg Lemberger. The Story of Invention. This contribution is a new excerpt from the research Lotto vs. Lemberger. Due dipinti politici di soggetto religioso intorno al 1522. It is its second section published after the one which appeared in 2017 on issue no. 1 of «Historia Artium» with the title Lipsia 1522. L’Epitaffio Schmidburg di Georg Lemberger. Religione, Politica e Pittura. This work has started from a comparative analysis of the Lemberger’s Schmidburg Epitaph and the Crucifixion by Lorenzo Lotto at Monte San Giusto. It has deliberately ignored the fact that the two paintings belong to two very different socio-cultural environments, that they have always remained separated from each other by more than one thousand kilometers and that they appear antithetical if considered from a stylistic and religious perspective. Being aware of such differences, the singularity of the compositional structure shared by the two paintings has brought to a parallel analysis of the three different sections in which both of them are articulated. In this structure, the simultaneous presence in the same sequence of three different genres of visual representation has been identified. In both works and in the same vertical sequence, appear in fact: the Icon (the Crucifixion, in the upper part); the Illustration (the characters and actions on the Golgotha, in the middle part); the Narrative (in the lower part, where the image of the customer is presented in a context which offers the key for a political interpretation of the whole painting). Being analyzed independently from each other and in a comparison between the two works of art, the three sections of the image have revealed such analogies to allow an interpretation of the occurring variations based on rhetoric, as if Lotto had intentionally confuted the religious theses illustrated by Lemberger. This contribution contains two paragraphs which are specular to those published on the 2017 issue of «Historia Artium» and dealing with the lower section of the German work of art. They analyze the lower section of the Italian work of art: here, Narrative is identified under the fallacious appearance of the Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross, and the content to which this narration is functional is being interpreted.