Restored in 2009 with funding from Ingrid and Fabrizio Aielli.

This fragmentary lunette depicting God the Father in Glory was probably once the arched upper portion of a small, unidentified altarpiece. As part of Teodoro Correr’s 1830 bequest to the city of Venice, the painting has belonged to the repository of the Correr Museum since its foundation; it was brought out of storage for restoration at the suggestion of former Save Venice Board member Prof. W. R. Rearick in the hope that conservation efforts would encourage renewed study of this fascinating work.

In 2003, Rearick thought that God the Father in Glory might be a rare painting by Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, a follower of Leonardo da Vinci who was born in the Lombard region of Italy and who worked in Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Following the restoration in 2009, Museo Correr curator Andrea Bellieni published an attribution to Lorenzo Lotto in the 2010 issue of the Bollettino dei Musei Civici Veneziani. Bellieni indicates that the work could be a surviving fragment of an altarpiece painted after December 1525 when Lotto returned to his native Venice from Bergamo.

The work was restored by conservator Maria Chiara Ceriotti of the ARKE restoration firm, with the guidance of project directors Filippo Pedrocco and Andrea Bellieni of the Correr Museum.

For select projects, conservation dossiers in Italian containing limited textual and photographic documentation may be available for consultation by appointment at the Venice office of Save Venice and the Rosand Library & Study Center. For inquiries, please contact us at venice@savevenice.org.

Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480–1556) [attr.]
God the Father in Glory
c. 1526, tempera and oil on panel
22.5 x 48 cm

Museo Correr: Homepage

Brown, David Alan, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco. Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997.

Humfrey, Peter. Lorenzo Lotto. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.