Christ taking leave of his Mother

After years of erratic wandering, shifting restlessly from town to town, Lotto spent the years 1513 to 1525 in Bergamo before returning to Venice for an extended period in 1526. It was in Bergamo that he produced the painting Christ Taking Leave of his Mother in 1521. At that time, according to Ridolfi’s testimony (1648), the panel was found in the home of Tassi. According to declarations by Tassi, the female donor depicted in the painting is Elisabetta Rota, wife of Domenico Tassi, whose brother Alvise, the Bishop of Recanati, was murdered in 1520. As the donor, Domenico was depicted in the pendant to this work, the Adoration of the Christ Child, whose composition is known through an old copy (Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia). The theme is a relative rarity in Italian painting. After the Resurrection of Lazarus and prior to the Entry into Jerusalem, which inaugurates the period of Christ’s life that is characterized by his suffering and death, the Savior takes leave of his mother in Bethany on Wednesday evening during Holy Week. Accompanied by Peter and another apostle, who has been interpreted as Judas, Thomas, Joseph, or James the Elder, Christ kneels before the Virgin and requests her blessing. He has spoken with her prior to the approaching events of the Passion, and has commended her to the protection of John and Mary Magdalene, who together catch the Virgin Mary as she collapses in unconsciousness. The scene is set in a barrel-vaulted, columnated, arcaded hall that recalls the courtyards of the palaces of Bergamo. In the background, the hall opens onto a garden, surrounded by a high wall, which contains a cruciform pergola (with central cupola) enclosed by a fence with an open doorway (an allusion to the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden, a metaphor from the Song of Solomon (4:2) that serves as an epithet for the Virgin Mary, and an emblem of the Immaculate Conception). Kneeling in the right foreground and depicted in profile is the female donor, who is accompanied by a small dog. She looks up from her book to witness the farewell scene. Visible along the lower edge of the picture, and cut off by it, is the repoussoir-style motif of a branch with cherries and an orange, an allusion to the blood of the Redeemer, but also to the joys of Paradise (cherries) or to salvation (orange). Depicted next to it is a folded letter bearing the signature of the artist and the year date.This scene, which does not feature in the Gospels, made its appearance in the fine arts in the late Middle Ages under the influence of the Meditationes of the Pseudo-Bonaventura, and became familiar through passion plays, becoming associated with the cycle of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary. In earlier versions of the scene, and in the north in particular (Dürer, Cranach), Christ stands beforeMary and blesses her. Christ is shown kneeling, his arms crossed before his breast in a gesture of humility, for the first time in early work by Correggio (London, The National Gallery), which dates from before 1514, and which apparently served Lotto as a model. X-ray images of the London picture have shown that Christ was originally depicted standing, a pose Correggio borrowed directly from a woodcut by Dürer from the Life of the Virgin (1511). C. Gould (1981) speculated that on his way toward Bergamo during his return from central Italy (Rome, the Marches), Lotto must have met the young Correggio in the town of Correggio (near Parma), where he may have viewed the London picture. Alongside the influence of models from north of the Alps, Lotto’s painting betrays the impact of the Florentine works of Raphael and Fra Bartolomeo, as well as the influence of the works of Leonardo da Vinci (M. Lucco 1997). Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019