Martyrdom of Saint Catherine

Gaudenzio Ferrari painted this around 1540 for the chapel of the brothers Francesco and Giulio Gallarati, in the old Franciscan church of Sant'Angelo in Milan. He frescoed their chapel as well. About a decade later the church was gone. It stood outside the line of the huge new bastions the Spanish governor was throwing round Milan, and in 1551 it was pulled down, the frescoes with it. The altarpiece was carried to the family's chapel in the new Sant'Angelo, built further in. In the 1800s a copy was put in its place and the original passed through private hands until the Lombardo-Venetian government bought it and gave it to the Brera in 1829. It is built from five vertical poplar planks, more than three metres tall, and it came back from the museum's own restoration workshop in 2018 after four years of work. It hangs in Room 15.