圣母子与圣弗拉维安和圣奥努弗里乌斯

Lotto signed and dated this small panel in 1508, the year he was called down to Rome. Pope Julius II had summoned a crowd of painters to decorate his new apartments in the Vatican, and Lotto was among them, working in the same rooms where a young Raphael was about to take over completely. Almost nothing Lotto did there survives. Raphael's frescoes cover it. So a quiet picture like this carries more of him from that moment. The Madonna sits with two saints against a dark ground, a bishop on one side and, on the other, the hermit Onuphrius, gaunt and long-haired and nearly naked. That deep black behind them owes something to Durer, who had been in Venice two years before.