The Crucifixion

The museum dates this canvas to about 1534. Gaudenzio Ferrari was then at the height of his powers, and in the years just before he had covered the walls of San Cristoforo in Vercelli with frescoes, among them a vast Crucifixion crowded with figures. Here the same subject is brought onto a nearly square canvas about 1.7 metres a side, painted in tempera.

The museum singles out the light, livid and harrowing, which wraps the figures and the landscape alike, and the agitated, dramatic pitch of the whole scene. It also makes a claim for what came after. That register, it says, became the starting point for a whole generation of Lombard painters. One of them, Morazzone, a painter active around 1600, studied Gaudenzio's work at Varallo closely enough for it to shape his own style.