Girolamo Romanino

In 1519 the canons of Cremona cathedral handed Girolamo Romanino a stretch of the nave and asked for the Passion of Christ. He was a painter from Brescia, then a city under Venetian rule, and in his mid-30s, and what he gave them still carries a jolt of feeling that his calmer rival back home, the painter Moretto, rarely reached.

Romanino had spent time in Venice, and you can see Titian and Giorgione in how he loaded his brush and lit a face. He also looked north, to the prints of Albrecht Dürer coming down over the Alps, and borrowed their sharp, almost harsh expressiveness for his crowds and his soldiers.

He stayed a Brescian to the end, taking a seat on the city council in 1559 and working late in life beside his son-in-law, the painter Lattanzio Gambara. His exact death date is uncertain, somewhere in the early 1560s.