A large picture with the sacrifice of the king and high priest Melchizedek when he went to meet Abraham as he was returning with the victories of his enemies”. This is what Lotto wrote in his Book of Various Expenses, on March 16, 1545. But he had already “seen” that scene in 1528, in Bergamo, while he was working on the cartoons for the inlays of the choir of Santa Maria Maggiore. There drew an ancient-style altar, with Hebrew inscriptions. Now the sacrificial table is made of wood, and covered with a white tablecloth, exactly as in the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which is Lotto’s last work, where the shelf is empty, free, perhaps because it at the place and time when the sacrifice was already consumed. Here the vegetation which is contained in the inlay is surprising and enchanting, even devastated in the proscenium, at most reduced to a background. Now it is luxuriant, enhanced in its fertility by the widespread presence of rabbits, and from the elephant legs, used as protomes to support the sacrificial table. As Genesis 14:17-19 recounts, it is Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who goes to meet Abraham in the valley of Shaveh, after he had “defeated Chedor-Laomer and the kings who were with him”. On that table are the bread and wine, the anticipation of the Eucharistic sacrifice that the Messiah, the “eternal priest”, would have made; he who, as prophesied in Psalm 110, will present himself “in the manner of Melchizedek”.There are two processions: of Priests and soldiers. It has the density of figures on the sides, as in Christ and the adulteress, and as in the Presentation in the Temple. One with distinctive, elegant and characterized faces, the other totally a shapeless and anonymous rabble, representing the soldier – winner and vanquished, without the possibility of distinction. There is Abraham offering “the tithe of all things”. Melchizedek and Lot, Abraham’s nephew, are the only ones looking beyond those who are present, beyond nature, to the sky.”