Portrait of a Crossbowman

In 1767 this portrait was catalogued as the work of Giorgione, the Venetian painter who had died more than 40 years before it was made. Only in the late 19th century did the art historians Adolfo Venturi and Giovanni Morelli give it to Lorenzo Lotto, and in 1894 another scholar, Gustavo Frizzoni, put a name to the sitter. He is Mastro Battista, a crossbowman from Rocca Contrada, a hill town in the Marche now called Arcevia. Lotto painted him around 1551, during the years he spent working in that region. The crossbow is the sign of his post, and the scholars behind a recent exhibition read it as the emblem of a civic duty bound up with discipline and responsibility. Battista himself looks caught in the middle of a thought. In the spring of 2026 the portrait spent two months in Ancona, the main port of the Marche, shown in the city's picture gallery beside a work by Titian.