Portrait of Febo da Brescia

The portraits of Laura da Pola and Febo da Brescia belong to the period in his career when Lotto was particularly active as a portraitist. Both paintings are signed and dated 1544. They were identified by Berenson as works of Lotto from the artist’s account book.

Rather than painting monarchs and prelates, as did Titian, Lotto portrayed the local nobility, fixing their traits with an acute eye. There is no rhetorical decorative detail but only the existential truth of the subject.

The sitters’ families, originally from Brescia and Pola, respectively, had settled in Treviso in the fourteenth century, and by the early fifteenth were counted among the wealthiest in the city. Febo Bettignoli da Bressa was born in 1524 and died violently in 1547, perhaps in battle. Lauara da Pola, much younger than her husband, was born in 1524 and died in 1596. In the portraits Lotto endows the Trevigian couple with markedly aristocratic air. He adopted a format and approach close to those customarily employed by Titian for his own high-ranking sitters: vertical field; planar poses; relatively neutral background; restriction of the accessories to a few.