Alms of Saint Anthoninus

Lotto finished this altarpiece in 1542, an old painter who had never made the money his talent deserved and knew what poverty looked like from the inside. The subject is charity itself. Antoninus, a 15th-century archbishop of Florence, sits enthroned above and hands out alms while two deacons read out the pleas of the poor crowding the steps below. Lotto noted in his account book that he spent the summer of 1541 making studies from real beggars for this, and their faces have the specific, unidealised look of people he watched. A bearded man in red among the supplicants may be Lotto himself. He painted it for the friars of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where it still stands.