Among his most ambitious works were images of dock workers (The Big Black Divers, 1944, showing a knot of intertwined figures in bright colours) and builders (The Constructors, 1950). This latter subject, represented in the exhibition by a study showing a group of builders taking a break from putting up a steel-frame building, is an example of his socialism in action (he joined the French Communist Party on his post-war return from exile in America). The working man, however, was less keen on Léger than he was on them, and when the finished painting was installed in the café of the Renault motor factory, the artist was disappointed that the workers paid so little attention to it.

Léger was always an independent artist and in his work he found a way to combine many of the competing strands of early 20th-century art — colour, dynamism, abstraction, the figurative, the city, the machine age, and three-dimensionality. “Let us gaze wide-eyed at present-day life, which rolls, moves, and overflows alongside us,” he said. And, having done so, “Let us endeavour to dam it up, canalise it, organise it plastically.” People were among the things to be organised plastically too, which is why he never painted portraits. What he did do though was strike a balance, often a joyous one, between real life and formal experimentation.

Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1557) had the ill- fortune to be born in Venice with Titian and Giorgione as peers and with Giovanni Bellini in his pomp. Although he had great talent it was not as great as theirs and it was his fate always to work in the shadow of others, something that was reflected in the trajectory of his career. He left Venice to set himself up on the Veneto in less glamorous locations such as Treviso, Bergamo and Ancona — although there was a foray to Rome to work on the papal apartments where, needless to say, he came up against the young Raphael. 

As a result — and as the National Gallery’s lovely exhibition of his portraits (until February 10, 2019) shows — he tended not to work for the Renaissance’s grandees but rather for its merchant and intellectual class. This though did not stop him from being an innovator. Lotto specialised in double portraits, such as his 1523 marriage portrait of Marsilio Cassotti and Faustina Assonica; in subject paintings that contained portraits (the deposed Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus stands in for the Virgin in his 1506 The Virgin in Glory between Saints Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse); and in unusually wide-format portraits, such as his 1527 depiction of Andrea Odoni, which consequently has space not just for the collector of antiquities but for his collection too.

Nevertheless, Lotto’s career was a struggle — “Art did not earn me what I spent,” he wrote — and in 1552 he gave up and retreated from the world to become a lay brother at the Holy House of Loreto. Whatever consolations his faith gave him, his wonderful portraits show that he deserved much better from the world at large.