Ambrogio Bergognone

Two of the Bergognone paintings at Brera were once part of a wall. His Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Agnes stood in niches in the transept of Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan, the small church the architect Bramante had just rebuilt, and he painted them there around 1495. In the 19th century they were cut away from the plaster, transferred onto canvas and handed to the Brera academy.

Before Milan he had spent seven years at the Certosa di Pavia, the Carthusian monastery the Visconti dukes founded as their burial church. From 1488 to 1495 he led the painting on that huge site, turning out altarpieces, frescoes and small panels for the monks themselves. One of the quiet ones hangs at Brera, a Madonna with Saint Catherine of Siena and a white-robed Carthusian kneeling at the edge of the scene.

His Milan years overlapped with Leonardo's, who was at work on the Last Supper a short walk away, and a whole generation of Lombard painters rebuilt their manner around him. Bergognone stayed with his own even light, still faces and carefully drawn architecture, and went on with it into the 1510s. In 1514 he came back to the Certosa to fresco a Madonna nursing the Child on the vault of the refectory.