EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Lotto’s Lion and The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine

After the recent post about how Sir Edwin Landseer became a couple of dogs (seriously), I thought it would be a good idea to keep up the pace and show how Lorenzo Lotto became a lion. Near the lower edge of one of his greatest masterpieces, The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine (1524), is the imagined head of the animal king (left), the attribute of St. Jerome who sits next to him. Two years earlier Lotto had painted his self-portrait (right) as St John the Baptist whose figure, still unrecognized, is "painting" the painting. (That'll be fodder for another post.) The comparison here, though, at first seems to show little similarity until you notice how the lion's mouth and "beard" resemble the artsits'. The lion's nose is odd too. It seems flat like a lion's but also in profile like Lotto's. Incidentally, Lotto's portrait deceives as well because it is not possible to turn your nose to the side as he does and still see so much of the far cheek. Be that as it may, the most convincing evidence, at least for me, is where the actual resemblance is least convincing: the eyes.

Take a look at Lotto's first. The one on the left is level; the other slopes downwards at about 20 degrees. He clearly had a problem with it. Now look at the lion's. His eye on the left is level too but the one on the right slopes upwards at about 20 degrees. Whichever way you look at it - upside down perhaps, at least metaphorically - the lion's eyes are Lotto's.