Till the year 1526 Lotto was much in Bergamo, where the first altarpiece gained him orders for others. The reputation of a member of the school of Venice was a sure passport to employment. We trace Alvise's tradition very plainly in the altarpiece in San Bernardino, where the gesture of the Madonna's hand as she expounds to the listening saints recalls Alvise's of 1480. The little gathered roses, which Lotto makes use of to the end of his life, lie scattered on the step; angels, daringly foreshortened, sweep aside the curtain of the sanctuary. The colour is in Lotto's scarlet, light blues, and violet. He soon shows himself fond of genre incidents, and in "Christ taking leave of His Mother" gives a view into a bedroom and a cat running across the floor. The donor kneels with her hair fashionably dressed and wearing a pearl necklace. In the "Marriage of S. Catherine" at Bergamo the saint is evidently a portrait, with hair pearl-wreathed. She kneels very simply and naturally before the Child, and the exquisitely lovely and elaborately gowned young woman who represents the Madonna, looks out towards the spectator with a mundane and curiously modern air. It was probably the recognition of Lotto's success with portraits that led to their being so often introduced into his sacred pieces. In the one we have just noticed, the donor, Niccolas Bonghi, is brought in, and is on rather a larger scale than the rest, but Lotto has evidently not found him interesting. The portraits of the brothers della Torre, and that of the Prothonotary Giuliano in the National Gallery, inaugurate that wonderful series of characterisations which are his greatest distinction. A series of frescoes in village churches round Bergamo must also be noticed. They are remarkable for spontaneous and original decoration, and may compare with the ceremonial groups of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. Lotto's personages, as they chatter in the market-places, are full of natural animation and gaiety, and we realise what a step had been made in the painting of actual life.