San Nicolás en gloria

In 1527 Lorenzo Lotto came back to Venice after nearly a decade working out in Bergamo, on the mainland, and this altarpiece was the first thing he painted on his return. A merchants' brotherhood devoted to Saint Nicholas commissioned it for their church, and Lotto gave them the saint enthroned on clouds high above, with John the Baptist and Saint Lucy beside him. What he did at the bottom was new. Below the holy figures he laid a small, dim landscape of water, shoreline and tiny boats, painted almost as a night scene. Venice, a city that prized bright Titian colour, was unimpressed at the time. That strip of dark coast sits under the saint's feet like a view glimpsed from the clouds.