The Physician Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his Son, Niccolò

Lorenzo Lotto had just settled in Bergamo, a prosperous town on the Venetian mainland, when he painted this local physician around 1515. Giovanni Agostino della Torre had taught medicine at Padua and led Bergamo's college of physicians, and he wears the dark academic gown of that office. In his hand he holds folded papers inscribed in Latin, one of them naming him a follower of Aesculapius, the ancient god of healing. The younger, bearded man behind him is his only son, Niccolo, who also practised medicine in the town. He seems to have been added a little later, probably when the old doctor died in 1516, turning a single portrait into a quiet record of a family and its trade.