Saint Catherine of Alexandria

For a long stretch nobody knew she was there. The saints Bergognone frescoed in the transept of Santa Maria presso San Satiro were covered over with lime, and this figure came back to light in 1857, when work in the right transept uncovered a bay holding three of them side by side, Mary Magdalene, Catherine of Alexandria and Martha.

The plaster was in poor condition by then. In 1878 the Brera academy paid to have the group lifted off the wall, and Antonio Zanchi and Giuseppe Steffanoni did the work, carrying the paint over onto canvas. Milan was demolishing and rebuilding on a large scale in those decades, and taking a fresco down was ordinary rescue rather than a special event.

The painted architecture came away with the figures, and restorers later used those columns to work out the order the fragments had stood in along the transept.