Portrait of a Gentleman

In Lotto's Venice of the 1530s melancholy had almost become a fashion, and this man in black is dressed for it. His right hand rests on a small heap of rose and jasmine petals, already loose and drying, with a little skull set among them. The other hand presses his side, over the spleen, which physicians of the day held to be the seat of grief. Through the window behind him a tiny Saint George fights the dragon, a saint especially loved by the Albanian and Balkan community then living in Venice, which is one reason the sitter has been guessed to be a soldier from that world. For a long time people took the face for Lotto himself. The petals and the skull argue otherwise. They belong to a portrait about mourning, made for someone with a loss to carry.