Maria mit Kind und den Heiligen Hieronymus und Nikolaus von Tolentino

Lotto worked this composition out around 1522, and he seems to have painted it more than once at the same time. The version now in Boston looks like the one where he resolved the design, which he then repeated on a canvas, signed and dated that year, that hangs in London, with a third variant in Bergamo swapping in different saints. The subject carries a quiet warning. The Christ Child sits not on his mother's lap but on a small coffin, and Saint Jerome weeps at the left holding a crucifix, so the infant's death is folded into the scene of his birth. Lotto was a Venetian, a near exact contemporary of Titian, though he spent much of his restless life working in provincial towns rather than the city itself.