Sacra Famiglia con santa Caterina d’Alessandria

Lorenzo Lotto signed and dated this in 1533, the year he gave up on Venice. He had never quite prospered in the city of Titian, and now he left it to spend the next seven years in the Marche, further down the Italian coast. For all that upheaval, the painting is intimate and quiet, made for a private chapel rather than a church wall. Joseph gently lifts a veil so that Saint Catherine can see the sleeping infant Christ. The child rests on a bare stone, which recalls a sarcophagus and the death still to come, and Mary, caught mid-reading, seems already troubled by what she knows. Lotto was a restless, anxious man, and something of that unease settles into the faces here.