“If I were an artist,” the art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson wrote in 1894, “I would resemble Lorenzo Lotto.” The following year, he published a monograph on Lotto, which marked the beginning of the painter’s return from three hundred years of obscurity. Berenson first saw in Lotto (1480-c.1556) what most admirers have found subsequently: an outlier in Italian Renaissance art, a portrait painter capable of capturing the soul on canvas, a man whose religious art struck a note of sincerity in an age bound by ritual and dogma, a figure overshadowed in life by Titian and Raphael and condemned to poverty and relative failure in his own day. Lotto’s time had come with the twentieth century because what had been seen as defects and eccentricities by his contemporaries turned into objects of fascination in an age dominated by Freud and artistic rebellion. Lotto’s unorthodox altarpieces were embraced for that very reason: they broke with convention and spoke from the heart. By the same token, his portraits veered away from the patterns established by Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian to articulate a different kind of sensibility because he engaged with less exalted and at times rather shopworn specimens of humanity.