Johann Carl Loth

When people in Venice spoke of the painter Carlotto, they did not always remember he was German. Johann Carl Loth was born in Munich in 1632, the son of a court painter, and he came south around 1663 to a city still living on the memory of Titian and Veronese. He never left. Venice absorbed him so completely that Italians simply Italianized his name into Carlotto, and he became one of the busiest history painters in the city.

His pictures tend to be crowded, muscular scenes from mythology and the Old Testament, lit in the heavy shadow that was fashionable there in his generation, a manner he shared with Giovan Battista Langetti, another painter of dark, dramatic subjects. The work carried far beyond the lagoon. Emperor Leopold I called for pictures from him in Vienna, and the Dutch biographer Arnold Houbraken listed him among the grand masters of the age.

Loth died in Venice in 1698 and was buried in the church of San Luca, near the Grand Canal. His younger brother Franz, also a painter, had worked at his side for years.