Pietà (Pietà of the Tear)

Its Italian nickname, Pietà della lacrima, the Pietà of the Tear, points straight at the faces. Saint John and the Virgin hold up the dead Christ between them, and the museum draws attention to their reddened, weeping eyes. In his religious pictures, it says, Giovanni Francesco Caroto always pressed on feeling and pathos, and here he does it at close quarters.

A dark rock fills the background and shuts most of the world out. Only the essentials of the story show past it, the three crosses of Calvary, enough to say where the body has come from. The three main figures lock together into a pyramid. The panel once hung in the Bevilacqua palace near the church of Santi Apostoli in Verona. Later it belonged to the collector Cesare Bernasconi, and with his bequest it entered the city's collections in 1871.