Pietà

This altarpiece is the most important surviving example of a number of works Lotto is known to have painted for churches in and around Treviso during his second period of residence in Treviso (1542-45). It was commissioned by the prioress of the Dominican nunnery of San Paolo. The church of San Paolo, destroyed after the suppression of the nunnery in 1810, had three chapels at the east end, the Pietà was placed in the chapel to the left of the high altar.

The Pietà is characterized by a mood of profound melancholy, expressed both by the anguished facial expression and by the encircling darkness. The painting is reminiscent of Botticelli's Lamentation, a painting that Lotto could have seen thirty years earlier in Florence, and it may have been responding to one of the most important examples of central Italian Mannerism seen in Venice, Salviati's Lamentation painted during 1539-41.