Paolo Morando

In 1522 Paolo Morando finished the largest canvas he ever painted, an altarpiece of the Virgin surrounded by the Virtues for the chapel of Saint Francis in San Bernardino, the Franciscan church of Verona. On 13 August that year he died in the city, in his mid-thirties. His birth is known only within a few years, somewhere between about 1485 and 1488.

Verona called him il Cavazzola, a nickname he took over from his father Taddeo. He trained in the workshop of the painter Domenico Morone and above all of Domenico's son Francesco, as the biographer Giorgio Vasari recorded in the 16th century. The work most often named as his masterpiece is a Passion of Christ painted around 1517 for the confraternity of the Cross, five canvases for another chapel of the same church, with the dead Christ lowered from the cross at the centre. Both altarpieces are now in the Castelvecchio museum. In those same few years he was also painting portraits, and one of them, dated 1518, hangs in Dresden.