Certain artists, and not necessarily the most accomplished or significant, are occasionally accorded a privileged stature in the contemporary popular imagination. They inhabit an exalted realm of myth, romance—or as is fashionable today, “cult”—that places their reputation, if not beyond criticism, certainly above it. Even a handful of Renaissance artists have been bestowed similar distinction (yes, Caravaggio is the obvious example). Identifying the circumstances that initiate and sustain this process of beatification is not difficult: certainly premature death (preferably suicide), a tormented sexuality or sociopathic disposition, posthumous oblivion and eventual rediscovery, extreme rarity of extant works. All these can play a part. Often, a spotty or incomplete historical record increases this aura of mystery and awe.

Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1557) fits this profile only imperfectly: the obscurity in which his reputation languished for nearly three centuries strikes a familiar note. Otherwise, he was a long-lived, exceptionally industrious, exceedingly God-fearing man, whom his contemporary Pietro Aretino famously (and with typically malicious irony) addressed as: “Oh Lotto, good as goodness and virtuous as virtue.” Moreover, there is copious contemporary documentation, an account book that he kept for many years, and, most importantly, an unusually large number of surviving works, many of them signed and dated. Yet, despite this lack of mystery and drama, Lorenzo Lotto is today accorded a reverence reserved for almost no other Italian High Renaissance artist. The reason may lie in the fact that when the twentieth century rediscovered this humble, provincial journeyman painter, it found a man