La Vierge à l'Enfant avec des saints

Lorenzo Lotto was still a young man around 1505 when he painted this, working in the orbit of Venice where Giovanni Bellini was the grand old master and Giorgione and a young Titian were the coming talents. Lotto gathered the Virgin and Child with several saints into a quiet group, the kind of holy gathering Venetians loved. Then he signed it with a joke. The infant Christ leans over to read a scroll held by an elderly saint, and the name written on that scroll, in Latin, is Lotto's own. Look past the figures to the landscape and you find men cutting down a tree. That felled wood is a quiet reminder of the cross the child will one day be nailed to.