chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà in Telusiano
Monte San Giusto, Italy
The story
The art historian Antonio Paolucci once remarked that the painting here is larger than the church. Step inside Santa Maria della Pietà in Telusiano, in the small town of Monte San Giusto in the Marche, and you see what he meant. Lorenzo Lotto's Crucifixion rises more than four metres above the altar.
It was commissioned by Niccolò Bonafede, bishop of Chiusi and an official of the papal court, who was born in this town. Lotto painted it mainly in Venice at the end of the 1520s, finished it around 1531, and it stood in its frame here by about 1534. His fee was 100 gold florins and a quantity of olive oil.
The picture reads in tiers. Christ and the two thieves hang against a darkening sky, soldiers and horsemen crowd beneath them, and at the bottom the Virgin faints into the arms of Saint John. In one corner Bonafede himself kneels while an angel presents the scene to him. Lotto's signature on the painting went unnoticed until 1831.
