The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (inventory no. GE-1447).
Location History:
The painting entered the Hermitage's collection in 1924, per the museum's own object record, and has remained there since.
Here a married couple sits together, their hands telling much of their story at a table covered with a richly patterned Anatolian carpet, and a few small objects that do not make a significant contribution to the dramatic action or intense expression of the scene. This canvas was part of a small, personally important group of Lotto's double portraits, of which there were few, if any, precedents in Venetian painting at the time the artist began producing them for the National Gallery's scholarship notes: "The married pair double portrait is a genre in which Lotto worked repeatedly over the course of his career and in which the National Gallery had no comparable examples at the time. What was unusual was that rarity, the fact that both the husband and the wife were equally featured in a single painting: together – a combination that was rarely seen in the portraiture of the era in which marriage and family life were documented by individual or single-sitter portraiture.
The inscription "Homo nunquam" ("man, never") is clearly held by the husband, and, as an unusual choice, conveys an immediate and literal statement, beyond any gesture or symbolism, a personal commitment permanently inscribed in paint, for as long as the canvas lasts. The carpet on the table is one of the many types Lotto portrays across his portraits and religious commissions, and art historians refer to this specific pattern type as a "Lotto carpet," a term that has been adopted for the study of Venetian and Anatolian textile trade: its presence here puts the sitters within a recognizable sign of Venetian domestic wealth and cosmopolitan taste, rather than acting solely as a background to the activity. Lotto's focus on the surface of these materials – whether cloth, fur trim, or the refined modeling of the sitter's hands – is characteristic of the Venetian portrait tradition's more tactile approach to closely observed detail, which served as a means to convey the status and character.
Husband and Wife, by Lorenzo Lotto, painted around 1543, is a much more personal take on the typical Renaissance marriage portrait. Huddled close together, the couple are almost sheltered from the storm visible through the window behind them. The husband looks directly at us holding a small piece of paper on which is written Homo nunquam, or "man, never", a pledge that he will never stray. The dog held by the woman possesses a similar idea of faithfulness, while the sleeping squirrel beside them has been read as a symbol of desire or wandering lust brought under control. These details make the painting feel almost like a private conversation about marriage, rather than just a record of two people. There is something touching, too, in the difference between the two faces. The woman is softer, more distant, and the husband’s eyes are a little bit red. This gives him a tired, almost sorrowful look. The storm outside makes the room a refuge. A place that offers some protection against the difficulties of life. A place of companionship. What makes the painting memorable is the way Lotto fills a seemingly formal portrait with little signs of affection, loss and promise to stay faithful.
