Despite his Venetian origins (Venice 1480) and the probable formation at Giovanni Bellini generating in him a high awareness of colour and light, his cosmopolitanism brings him to detachment from the manner dominating in the Serenissima.

During his travelling he develops a very personal style, capable of adhering more and more to an extreme naturalism, to the Mannerism which dominated in Central Italy, and a joyous lyricism of atmosphere and colours.

With great inventiveness and a certain intrinsic humour, Lotto prefers a certain taste for the 'bizarre', inserting obscure symbols, visual ambiguities, and curious details even in his religious subject paintings.

His continuous moving is motivated by the necessity of acquiring customers, but also by his incapacity to lead a sedentary life, tied into a static reality.

Lotto returns this restlessness in his canvases and in the altarpieces, dominated by bright and discordant colours, and animated by nervous rhythms created by the light and by the expressive gestural expressiveness of the characters.

Despite the success he obtained in Treviso, the maestro moves to Recanati in 1506, to paint the "Polittico di San Domenico" (1508), and to take advantage of the closeness of Loreto, a favourite pilgrimage place of Pope Giulio II. The hope of obtaining from him important commissions concretises in 1508, a year in which he goes to to paint the Vatican Palace frescoes, which had been destroyed.

Travels to Bergamo and Venice allow him to further develop his portrait ability as well as the inventiveness of sacred image painting, which concretises in a greater idealisation in the saints’ faces and in postures’ more emphatic magniloquence.
 
From the middle of the thirties to his death (1556/1557), apart from brief travels to Treviso and once more to Venice (1540), Lotto works mostly in the Marche. The scarce success here generate a gradual distancing from the world that surrounds him.

If the paintings of the thirties are still characterised by intense emotions and colours, in the last Marche years they acquire a constantly more introspective and dark style. The look and the posture of his subjects, whose harmony directly involved viewers bringing them to identify with them, are now looking towards a private and more personal world.

The attention that was always given to sacred subjects gets stronger, and his adhesion to them gets ever deeper and more personal. An example that stands out about this sensitivity is "La Presentazione di Cristo al Tempio", painted for Loreto’s basilisk, which probably represents his last work.

With a deeply restless and religious soul, from 1554 he retired to the Holy House of Loreto, where, having become a lay brother, he dies in 1556.

Lorenzo Lotto’s works in the Marche: