Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480-1556/7) painted some of the most startlingly beautiful as well as some of the most puzzling and moving works of the later Renaissance. In this beautifully illustrated account of Lotto's life and work, Peter Humfrey offers the first comprehensive treatment of Lotto in English since Bernard Berenson's pioneering study published one hundred years ago. Humfrey draws on the large body of Lotto's extant work as well as on sixteenth-century documentation on the artist's life, including his letters, his account-book for the years 1538-56 and his will. Lotto first practised as a painter in the town of Treviso, but during his long and restless career he also spent periods in Bergamo and the Marches, as well as in Venice itself. His final, lonely years were passed in Loreto, where he died as a lay brother in the local religious community. Humfrey examines the way in which Lotto responded to the work of a wide range of artists, from Giovanni Bellini and Albrecht Durer toRaphael and Titian, but also emphasises the painter's marked stylistic individuality, even idiosyncrasy. Particularly attractive to twentieth-century viewers are Lotto's portraits, the psychological penetration of which reveal a personality exceptionally finely attuned to the thoughts and emotions of his fellow human-beings.

The artist emerges as one of the most engaging and distinctive personalities of Italian Renaissance art.