Supper in the House of Simon Pharisee

Supper in the House of Simon the Pharisee from around 1550 at the Church of Santa Maria in Calchera in Brescia is a monumental narrative composition. The subject allowed Moretto to combine his talent for figure painting with the architectural settings and feast-scene formats popular in northern Italian art. Moretto da Brescia, the leading painter in Brescia in the first half of the sixteenth century, developed an independent artistic identity that drew on the Venetian tradition (Titian, Savoldo, Lotto), the Lombard tradition of surface precision, and his own observation of the religious life of the Brescian churches and confraternities that were his primary patrons. His altarpieces and devotional panels combine the warm Venetian colorism he absorbed from Venice with a specifically Brescian quality of religious seriousness — the Counter-Reformation devotional culture of a city that took its Catholicism with unusual intensity. His influence on the subsequent generation of Brescian painters, particularly Moroni, was foundational.

The large-scale composition orchestrates multiple figures around the feast table. Moretto's silvery palette and careful attention to spatial organization create a scene of restrained dramatic power.