Giovanni Battista Moroni

Around 1570 an Italian painter did something almost no one else of his time would, he painted a working tailor as though he were a nobleman. Giovanni Battista Moroni's picture shows a man in a doublet standing at his bench, shears in hand, a length of cloth marked out in front of him, looking calmly up at the viewer as if interrupted mid-cut.

Moroni worked in and around Bergamo, in Lombardy, away from the great art centres, and made his living on sober, exact portraits of the local gentry and clergy. He rarely idealised. His sitters have real skin, plain clothes and steady, unperformed expressions.

That honesty is why The Tailor, now in London's National Gallery, still feels so modern, a nameless craftsman granted the dignity of a formal portrait. Moroni kept painting the people of his corner of Lombardy until his death in 1578.