A complete ‘Lotto’ Arabesque rug

The distinctive, angular yellow lattice that meanders and scrolls over the rich red ground of this rug instantly identifies it as a ‘Lotto’, so-called because the same class of rug appears in two works by the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556): The Alms of St Antoninus in the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice (1542) and the Portrait of Giovanni della Volta and his Wife and Children in the National Gallery, London (1547). The earliest verifiable appearance of this design in European painting, however, is in the portrait of Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary and Two Geographers by Sebastiano del Piombo, dated to 1516 and held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.