Portrait of a Nun

In the first decades of the 17th century a group of painters in Verona moved away from the manner of Venice toward something plainer and closer to life, the naturalism of Caravaggio in Rome and of Domenico Fetti, court painter at Mantua. The museum hangs this portrait in the room it devotes to that moment.

The nun is seen very close, and nothing tells us who she was or which convent she belonged to. The museum calls the picture Bassetti's highest expressive achievement, a portrait of detachment, meditation and silence. There are no attributes and no story, only the habit of her rule, painted in shades so close to each other that the picture is almost a single colour. It came to the museum from the collection of Antonio Pompei, in Verona.