Portrait of Giovanni della Volta with his Wife and Children

Lorenzo Lotto kept a careful account book in his later years, and in it, on 23 September 1547, he noted handing a picture to Giovanni della Volta, his landlord, a portrait of the man with his wife and their two children. It seems he painted it in place of rent. Lotto was in his late sixties by then, out of fashion in a Venice that preferred the grander manner of Titian, and often short of money. The family gathers at a table spread with a patterned Turkish carpet, the mother offering cherries from a silver bowl while the small boy stretches up on one leg for a pair his father dangles just out of reach. Lotto rarely painted family groups like this, and within a few years he gave up independent life and entered a religious house at Loreto.