Madonna and child with Saint Catherine, Saint James the Greater, and an angel

Lotto probably painted this soon after moving back to Venice around 1527, and for a long time nobody thought it was his at all. When a Venetian writer first described it in 1660, hanging in the imperial Habsburg collection, he praised it warmly but put it down to Palma il Vecchio, an older Venetian painter whose composition Lotto had in fact borrowed for the arrangement of the figures. Only later did scholars recognise the hand as Lotto's own. The Virgin holds the Child while Saint Catherine and Saint James the Great gather in close on one side, in the quiet, informal grouping the Venetians called a sacred conversation. It was almost certainly made for a private home rather than a church.