Madonna mit Kind zwischen den Heiligen Flavian und Onuphrius

Lotto signed and dated this small panel in 1508, the year he was called down to Rome. Pope Julius II had summoned a crowd of painters to decorate his new apartments in the Vatican, and Lotto was among them, working in the same rooms where a young Raphael was about to take over completely. Almost nothing Lotto did there survives. Raphael's frescoes cover it. So a quiet picture like this carries more of him from that moment. The Madonna sits with two saints against a dark ground, a bishop on one side and, on the other, the hermit Onuphrius, gaunt and long-haired and nearly naked. That deep black behind them owes something to Durer, who had been in Venice two years before.