Descent from the Cross

The Carmelite friars of Verona spent more than half a century building their church on the Isolo, a quarter that was then an island between the Adige and a side channel of the river, and consecrated it only in 1504. It took its name from an older chapel on the site dedicated to Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury murdered in his cathedral in 1170, and Veronese still call it San Tommaso Cantuariense. This panel came from that church.

Liberale painted it around 1524, when he was close to 80. In the same years engravings after Raphael were reaching Verona, and younger painters were taking up his harmonious manner. Liberale's picture shows nothing of it. The museum describes its faces as expressionistic masks of an elementary, primitive and sincere piety, and his brush moves more broadly and loosely than in his youth. At the edges, strips of landscape survive with roads climbing straight up the hills to towered towns, as in the Gothic paintings of many decades before.