Saint Catherine's Body Carried by the Angels

Catherine of Alexandria was beheaded, the legend says, and then angels lifted her body and carried it across the desert to Mount Sinai, where a monastery keeps her relics still. Luini painted that flight around 1514 on the wall of a private chapel at a country house outside Milan.

Three centuries later the house belonged to the Austrian administration of Lombardy and was about to be sold. Rather than let the paintings go with the building, a restorer named Stefano Barezzi spent 1821 and 1822 cutting the frescoes off the plaster and transferring them onto wooden panels. The cycle did not survive the move as one thing. Pieces of it ended up in London and at Chantilly, north of Paris.

This fragment came to Brera and is among the largest to survive from that chapel, a little over two and a quarter metres across, hanging in Room 10 near other scenes lifted from the same house.