Lorenzo Lotto. Imagined Encounters

TOSIO MARTINENGO ART GALLERY

Colors, emotions, and gestures of Lorenzo Lotto, a journey of beauty, and an opportunity to revisit some of the masterpieces of the collection through imagined encounters between Lotto, Savoldo, Romanino, and Moretto.
The charm of art history arises from the works, the artists, and is enriched by encounters, real and ideal, that have occurred or are imagined; encounters of themes, styles, inspirations, of a common sentiment and talent that, centuries later, continue to fascinate us, making us think of those artists as masters and those encounters as enchanting.

Lorenzo Lotto: Imagined Encounters at Tosio Martinengo Art Gallery renews that wonder, thanks to extraordinary loans, speaking of one of the most fascinating protagonists of art history and, at the same time, narrates those encounters through dialogues proposed with some masterpieces from the Collection. The protagonist is Lorenzo Lotto (1480 - 1556/1557), and the encounters are with the almost contemporaneous masters of the sixteenth century in the Brescia area, such as Savoldo (circa 1480 – post 1548), Romanino (circa 1484 – 1566), and Moretto (circa 1492-1495 – 1554). The journey, within the rooms of the art gallery, is created through five works by the genius of the Venetian sixteenth century, four from loans and one present in the Tosio Collection.

The project by the Brescia Museums Foundation, from December 1, 2023, to April 7, 2024, represents the culmination of the cultural offering that Brescia Museums have organized in the year of Bergamo Brescia as the Italian Capital of Culture.

In 1528, Lotto wrote a letter to Moretto seeking help in the project for the cartoons for the choir of the cathedral of Bergamo. The document reveals a consolidated relationship of esteem and, one might say, friendship between the two, probably dating back some years. There are no further records of direct contacts between Lotto and the masters from Brescia, although their simultaneous presence in various cities of the Venetian mainland domains – and, at least for Savoldo, in the lagoon – suggests traces of encounters, indeed "imagined," and a mutual knowledge, if not personal, certainly mediated by public art works, starting with altarpieces.

Light, gestures, expressiveness, color, themes, some stylistic solutions, certainly chronological proximity, and the frequentation in territories dominated by Venice are just some of the characteristics of the artists brought together in this exhibition: Lotto and Savoldo, Lotto and Moretto, Lotto and Romanino.

Then, as always happens in a museum, new encounters take place between loans and works from the collection, thanks also to the gazes, curiosity, and intuition of the visitors. This project aims to be a suggestion of wonders, of encounters primarily around the sensitivity that perhaps serves as the common thread to read Lotto's work together with that of Savoldo, Moretto, and Romanino: ways of painting that found in the representation of figures, highly personal and always very human transpositions.

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