Francesco Morone

At the foot of the throne in the Brera's Madonna between Saint Nicholas and Saint Zeno, Verona's own patron, there is a painted scrap of paper carrying a line of Latin: Franciscus filius m. dominici de Moroni pinxit. Francesco, son of master Domenico Moroni, painted it. He was about 31 and taking his own commissions by then, and his father was alive and still working.

Verona had been a Venetian city for a century, and its painters were pulled two ways. Domenico had absorbed the hard sculptural drawing of Mantegna, court painter at nearby Mantua, while the warmer colour of Venice arrived over the same roads as the Venetian governors. Francesco trained in his father's shop alongside Girolamo dai Libri, a manuscript illuminator who stayed his friend for life and later painted the organ shutters of Santa Maria in Organo with him.

That church holds his best work. Between 1505 and 1507 he frescoed its sacristy, above the panels of wooden inlay that a monk of the house, Fra Giovanni da Verona, had fitted around the room. Vasari saw it more than 40 years later and wrote that it was the most beautiful sacristy in Italy. Morone made his will in Verona on 15 May 1529 and died the same day. He was buried in San Bernardino, the Franciscan church that already held his first signed picture, a Crucifixion of 1498, and his father's grave.