Chiesa di San Bartolomeo

Few parish churches in Lombardy hold a painting of this rank. Inside the Church of San Bartolomeo, Lorenzo Lotto's Pala Martinengo fills the choir with one of the largest and most celebrated altarpieces of the Italian Renaissance, painted for a Dominican church and never moved from the city.

Why it matters

The church's claim on art history rests on a single, overwhelming work. The Pala Martinengo, signed and dated 1516 on the throne cartouche, is regarded as Lotto's largest altarpiece and stands among the key paintings of his long Venetian-region career. It remains exactly where later generations installed it, on the altar for which it was destined in the seventeenth century, in a functioning parish church. The painting is a key work for understanding Lotto's presence in Bergamo.

What to notice

The panel, painted in oil on poplar wood, measures 528 by 342 centimetres, and with its original frame, predella and crest it once rose higher still. Look for Lotto's signature, "Laurentius Lotus MDXVI", on the cartouche of the Virgin's throne. The composition is a sacra conversazione: the Madonna and Child enthroned among saints, set within an illusionistically opened church nave that anticipates the space you are actually standing in. Guides also point out small painted emblems, the imprese, including a sword balanced with scales that alludes to the justice of the Venetian Republic, Bergamo's ruler at the time.

Context and history

The altarpiece was commissioned on 15 May 1513 by Alessandro Martinengo Colleoni, a captain and nephew of the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni, for the high chapel of the Dominican church of Santo Stefano in Bergamo Alta. The commission came at the very start of Lotto's twelve Bergamo years, 1513 to 1525, the period that spread his works across churches and chapels throughout the city. Lotto finished the panel by 1516, and it was installed in 1517. When Santo Stefano was demolished in 1561 to make way for the Venetian Walls, the panel began a slow migration: first to San Bernardino, then, in 1647, into the choir of the new Dominican church of San Bartolomeo, today formally dedicated to Saints Bartolomeo and Stefano. The painting therefore outlived the building that commissioned it, which is why the church preserves both names in its identity.