Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery

Lotto crowds this story so tightly that there is hardly room to stand. Christ is hemmed in by soldiers in armour, turbaned elders and men jabbing their fingers at the woman, pressing him to say whether she should be stoned under the Law of Moses. She stands at the left, shoulders bare, head bowed, and Christ raises an open hand between her and them. Lotto painted it in Venice in the late 1520s. It may have been among the pictures the ageing painter offered for public sale at the merchants' loggia in Ancona in 1550. It was certainly in France before 1581, when the engraver Marc Duval made a print of it, and in 1671 Louis XIV bought it from a collector, Pierre-Alexis Ponce de La Feuille. It now hangs in the vestibule of the Salle des États, the room of the Mona Lisa.