Coronation of the Virgin

This fresco once decorated the tomb of Aventino Fracastoro, a celebrated physician to the Della Scala lords, which still stands against the front of the church of San Fermo in Verona. It was painted in the 1380s, and so little of it survives that the museum finds it hard to judge. Christ sits under a Gothic canopy among crowded saints, and around him the plaster shows more gaps than paint. Four prophets once filled the underside of the arch.

Taking the fresco off the wall revealed what lay underneath, and that now hangs beside it. There were three layers of sinopia, the quick preparatory drawings made on the wall. The first, in red ochre, shows a composition that was later abandoned. The middle one, in green earth, holds heads and studies of hands unrelated to the final picture, as if the whole workshop had practised there. One bearded profile recalls the Roman emperors, copied from ancient medals, that Altichiero painted in the loggia of Cansignorio della Scala.