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Lorenzo Lotto was a painter of Venice.
He is often thought to paint in the style Giovanni Bellini
(c. 1430 – 1516). Like Bellini he often used Ottoman
carpets in his paintings. Both artists gained prominence
in rug studies when German scholars used these paintings
to date possible date ranges of carpets. Put simply for a
rug type to appear in a painting it must predate the
painting.
Lotto gained another distinction in
the debate over the possible use of optical lenses in
Renaissance painting. The
artist David Hockney and physics professor
Charles M. Falco, University of Arizona
co-published a theory that artists used lens projection
to aid painting.
Dr.
David G. Stork the Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations a
noted expert on optics and image processing disputed
Hockney and Falco based on the rugs of Lorenzo Lotto.
Stork used me as a resource as he was crafting his
response to Hockney and Falco. David Hockney originally
cited Lorenzo
Lotto's Husband and Wife as the Rosetta Stone of his
optical projection theory. Christopher Tyler then showed
anomalies on the rug pattern that made Hockney's thesis
improbable. Starting with Tyler's work Stork was able to
use the carpets to demonstrate the inconsistency in
Hockney and Falco thesis. Stork used the question of
symmetry in classic Turkish carpets to make his point.
Lorenzo
Lotto Painter of Venice
The Lotto Rugs
The Lotto Paintings
| The Origin of the Lotto Design In most
Turkish rugs we can see a fairly straight forward
derivation of design. Many rugs derive from
Turkmen patterns that came to Turkey in various
Turkmen migrations. Other designs come from
Persian rugs given as tribute by the Safavid
Shahs. Some patterns derive from translation of
kilim designs to pile weaving. But in a handful
of cases we see a design created in an artists
workshop and then woven into pile rugs. I think The
James A. Lucas early 16th C. Oushak
"Lotto" rug to the right is an
early and classic example of that. I see no
precursor designs that would have evolved into
the Lotto pattern. Since as Parmenides taught us ex
nihilo nihil fit (Nothing comes from
nothing) the design had to be introduced into the
lexicon of woven design from an independent
source. It is neither Persian nor Mamluk and
since the pattern appears to date no earlier that
the second half of the 15th century and probably
the early 16th century the logical source would
have to be a court sponsored atelier. As was the
wont of court artists of that era the design
draws on a repetition of flowers and carnation
leaves both of which lend credence to the
suggestion of Turkish origin. The artist himself
is lost to history and he may well have been
Persian or European in origin but the subject
matter and the rendition id distinctively
Turkish.
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 Oushak
Rugs: The James A. Lucas early 16th C. Oushak
"Lotto" rug
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