The story
In Lorenzo Lotto's Annunciation, painted around 1534, the angel arrives behind Mary so suddenly that she turns towards us with her hands raised, and a cat bolts across the floor of her room. The picture is still in Recanati, the hill town in the Marches where it was probably made for a confraternity of local merchants. Today it hangs in the civic museum at Villa Colloredo Mels, a noble family's villa that the town bought in 1998.
Lotto, a Venetian who spent much of his restless career in the Marches, is shown here with two earlier commissions from the town. One is the polyptych he painted between 1506 and 1508 for the Dominican church of San Domenico. The other is a Transfiguration made a few years later, after his stay in Rome, for the church of Santa Maria di Castelnuovo.
The rest of the villa walks through the town's history, from Neolithic finds to a charter of the emperor Frederick II with a rare gold seal, and ends with rooms on the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who was born in Recanati in 1798.
