Trinità

Lorenzo Lotto made this altarpiece in Bergamo in the early 1520s, for a church of the Trinity that stood in the town and was later pulled down. What is unusual is how he painted God the Father. Instead of the familiar old bearded man, the Father appears as a burst of pure light behind the risen Christ, arms raised, barely a figure at all. Lotto was following a line from Deuteronomy, that the people saw no image of God but only heard a voice, and he tried to paint exactly that. Christ rises against a wide sky and a rainbow, with the dove of the Holy Spirit above him. When the Trinity church was suppressed in 1808 the picture passed through private hands, and in 1818 it came to the church of Sant'Alessandro della Croce, where it still belongs.