Christ with Saints Peter and Paul

The Christ at the centre of this relief faces straight out, still and frontal, in a way the museum calls Byzantine. Above him an inscription speaks in his own voice. Sum deus et factor, it begins, I am God and the maker of heaven and earth. On either side stand the two apostles of Rome. Peter receives the keys, and Paul receives a book. The scheme of Christ handing his law to these two was born in the churches and on the sarcophagi of 4th-century Rome.

The marble slab was the front of a ciborium, the stone canopy that rose over the high altar of Verona Cathedral. In its lower left corner the sculptor carved his name, Pelegrinus.