Asolo Duomo

When Lorenzo Lotto painted his altarpiece for Asolo in 1506, the little hill town belonged to Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian noblewoman who had been Queen of Cyprus. Venice gave her Asolo as a lordship in 1489, and she kept a small court here for about 20 years. One of her gifts is still in the Duomo, the baptismal font she commissioned in 1491.

Lotto was then a young painter working around Treviso. His picture shows the Virgin rising into heaven above two saints, Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse. Who ordered it is not known, and by the early 19th century it hung in another church in town, Santa Caterina, before reaching the cathedral. Today it sits in the left aisle beside a second Assumption, painted in 1549 by Jacopo Bassano, the master from nearby Bassano del Grappa. The bright three-aisled interior around them owes its shape to Giorgio Massari, the 18th-century Venetian architect.