Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Leonardo da Vinci left Milan for good in 1513, but his manner stayed behind and became a business. Giampietrino had worked in his Milanese circle, and he built a steady trade painting soft, half-length holy women in Leonardo's style, the kind of intimate image a household could pray to. Saint Catherine of Alexandria was one of his favourite subjects, and he repeated her more than once, with small changes each time. He gives her the wheel of her legend, the spiked wheel on which she was to be martyred and which, the story says, broke apart at her touch. The smoky transitions of light on her skin are the sfumato he took from Leonardo, made here decades later for a market that still wanted that look.