Vierge à l'Enfant en gloire avec saint Martin et sainte Catherine

Moretto worked in Brescia, a Lombard town under Venetian rule, and around 1530 he made this altarpiece for the village church of San Martino at Porzano, just outside the city. That is why Saint Martin stands below the Madonna, sharing the picture with Saint Catherine. He was the church's own patron. Historians treat the painting as the first fully mature work of an artist still in his thirties. You can watch him take in the warm colour of nearby Venice while holding on to a plainer, more grounded Lombard feeling for cloth, weight and ordinary faces. That sober naturalism is the thing he would pass to his Brescian pupil Giovanni Battista Moroni, who grew into one of the great portrait painters of the century.