Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine of Siena and a Carthusian Monk

Carthusians lived alone. At the Certosa di Pavia each monk had his own cell and his own small garden and met the others mainly in church, so a picture hanging in a cell was steady company. This panel is one of those, 46 centimetres tall, painted for a cell while Bergognone was at work on the monastery around 1490.

The kneeling monk is usually identified as Stefano Maconi, a Sienese who had served as secretary to Catherine of Siena before he took the Carthusian habit and rose to be prior of this charterhouse. He had been dead some seventy years by the time the panel was made, which is why Catherine herself stands behind him with a lily. She had been made a saint in 1461.

In the distance there is a Lombard town on the water, and the church standing apart on the right is generally read as the Certosa, the house that monk once ran.