Moretto da Brescia

Around 1526, a painter in the northern Italian city of Brescia did something no Italian artist is known to have done before. Moretto da Brescia, born Alessandro Bonvicino, painted a life-size man standing full-length, alone, in his own portrait, with no saint or story to justify the scale. The picture now in London's National Gallery is held to be the earliest surviving standing portrait of its kind in Italian art, made before Titian tried the same thing.

Moretto spent almost his whole life in Brescia, then part of the Venetian Republic, filling its churches with calm, silvery altarpieces. He had absorbed the warm colour of nearby Venice, but kept a sober, north-Italian plainness that suited his devout patrons.

His deepest mark on later art came through a pupil. The young Giovanni Battista Moroni trained in his workshop and carried the full-length portrait forward into one of the great runs of portraiture of the century. The identity of that first standing sitter is still uncertain. An old tradition links him to the Avogadro family of Brescia, whose members Moroni would later paint in the same commanding pose.