Christ in the Wilderness

Christ in the Wilderness from around 1515 at the Metropolitan Museum shows the young Moretto treating the subject of Christ's temptation in the desert. This early work demonstrates his developing style before the full maturation of his distinctive silvery manner. His religious works possess a grave, introspective dignity that set them apart from the more theatrical tendencies of contemporary Venetian painting. 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 solitary figure is set against a landscape with early atmospheric handling. Moretto's developing palette and figure treatment show the foundations of his mature contemplative style.