Madonna in Glory with the Christ Child, St. Jerome, St. Francis and St. Anthony the Abbot

Gardone Val Trompia, the town north of Brescia where this altarpiece hung, lived off gun barrels. In 1526 a master there named Bartolomeo Beretta sold 185 arquebus barrels to the Arsenal of Venice for 296 ducats, the first surviving document of a firm that still works in the same town, and by the middle of the century Gardone barrels were reaching Charles V and the kings of France and England. The Franciscans of Santa Maria degli Angeli served that community, and in 1543 Moretto delivered them this canvas, two and a half metres tall. The Madonna sits in a ring of cherubim with the crescent moon of the Book of Revelation under her foot. Below her, behind a parapet with a carpet thrown over it, stand Jerome, Anthony the Abbot, and Francis in the middle. One of the two painted pilasters flanking the Madonna is shown broken off, in the antique manner.