The Passion Polyptych

In the canvas of the Deposition, dated 1517, a man in a turban with a red beard stands beside the cross. He is Nicodemus, who in the Gospel of John helped take down the body of Christ, and according to the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari he is also the painter, Paolo Morando, portraying himself. Behind the scene Morando set his own city, Verona, with the Visconti castle of San Pietro on its hill.

The five canvases, the Agony in the Garden, the Crowning with Thorns, the Flagellation, the Way to Calvary and the Deposition, once formed the centre of a great painted screen in the Avanzi chapel of San Bernardino. That screen took almost half a century to complete. It began with a Crucifixion by Francesco Morone in 1498, took in work by Giovanni Francesco Caroto and Nicola Giolfino, and was finished only in 1546 by Antonio Badile and the young Paolo Veronese.