Lorenzo Lotto

Lorenzo Lotto painted faces that seem to be thinking, and it cost him the fame he deserved. A Venetian by birth, he worked in the shadow of Titian, the towering star of Venice, and rather than fight for the big city commissions he spent his life on the move, taking work in provincial towns like Bergamo and out in the hill country of the Marche.

His portraits are what draw people now. His sitters look distracted, melancholy or wary, caught in a private mood, often with a small telling object beside them, a scattered rose, a skull, a lizard. He seemed more interested in a person's inner weather than in flattering their rank.

Lotto kept a careful account book late in life, and it survives, a rare, plain record of exactly what a Renaissance painter earned and spent, reading like the ledger of a worried man. Poor and ageing, he finally became a lay brother at the shrine of the Holy House in Loreto, on the Adriatic coast, where he died around 1556, painting for his keep among the monks.