Das Recanati-Polyptychon

Lorenzo Lotto was still a young painter, in his mid-twenties, when the Dominican friars of Recanati, a hill town in the Marche, hired him to make this altarpiece for their church of San Domenico. He signed and dated it 1508. Decades later Giorgio Vasari saw it in place and noted that Lotto here worked partly in the manner of the Bellini family of Venice and partly like Giorgione, the two currents shaping every ambitious young Venetian of that moment. The polyptych is built as a large central panel flanked by smaller ones, with saints above and a Pieta crowning the top. By 1861 it had been taken apart, and only later was it reassembled and moved into the town's museum, where the panels hang together again much as the friars first saw them.