  The ladder Bethe-Salpeter solution for the dressed photon-quark vertex is
used to study the low-momentum behavior of the pion electromagnetic and the
$\gamma^\star \pi^0 \gamma$ transition form factors. With model parameters
previously fixed by light meson masses and decay constants, the low-momentum
slope of both form factors is in excellent agreement with the data. In
comparison, the often-used Ball-Chiu Ansatz for the vertex is found to be
deficient; less than half of the obtained $r_\pi^2$ is generated by that Ansatz
while the remainder of the charge radius could be attributed to the tail of the
$\rho$ resonance.
