Portrait of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria

In the early 1550s the small Alpine town of Trento was crowded with bishops and cardinals. The Council of Trent had drawn the leaders of the Catholic Church there to answer the Reformation, and it drew portrait painters looking for work as well. Giovanni Battista Moroni was one of them, and among the people he met was a young sculptor from nearby, Alessandro Vittoria, then at the start of a long career in Venice. Moroni shows him with his sleeves pushed up, both hands cradling a small antique statue of a nude figure and turning to meet your eye. The rolled sleeves and the ancient marble say plainly what this man does and what he studies. The little statue he holds is Roman, the kind of classical fragment sculptors of his generation prized and measured themselves against.