Madonna with child in glory with Saints Roch, Martin, and Sebastian

Madonna with Child in Glory with Saints Roch, Martin, and Sebastian from 1525 at the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie is a major altarpiece combining plague saints with the enthroned Madonna. Such groupings of protective saints were common in areas affected by epidemic disease. 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 complex composition groups the celestial Madonna with the earthly saints below. Moretto's silvery palette and balanced arrangement create a monumental devotional image.