Vierge en majesté avec l'Enfant et des saints

By the mid-1530s Brescia had spent decades under Venetian rule, and its leading painter, Alessandro Bonvicino — everyone called him Moretto — had learned to borrow Venice's warm colour and then cool it right down. This altarpiece went to a church in nearby Bergamo around 1536, and the saints kneeling around the enthroned Virgin are local ones: Eusebia, Andrew, Domno and Domneone, names a Bergamo congregation would have known by heart. Moretto rarely left this corner of Lombardy. He spent most of his life painting quiet, grey-silver altarpieces for its churches, and many of them, like this one, still hang where he meant them to be seen.