Church of Santo Spirito, Bergamo

In the fourth chapel on the south side of Santo Spirito, in Bergamo's lower town, hangs the altarpiece Lorenzo Lotto signed and dated 1521. The Venetian painter spent more than a decade working in Bergamo, and here he set the Madonna and Child among Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Augustine, Sebastian and Anthony Abbot, with the infant John the Baptist and a lamb at the foot of the throne. It was most likely commissioned by Balsarino Marchetti Angelini, Lotto's friend and patron, who had paid for that chapel a few years earlier.

Lotto's panel is one of several Renaissance altarpieces in the church. In another chapel Ambrogio Bergognone, the Milanese painter, left a polyptych of the Descent of the Holy Spirit in 1507, a fitting subject for a church named after the Holy Spirit. Andrea Previtali, a Bergamo painter trained in Venice, is represented too, including a two-tier polyptych of 1525 made with his assistant Agostino Facheris.

The church goes back to the 14th century, when Cardinal Guglielmo Longo founded it together with a hospital and a convent. The nave, with five chapels on each side, was rebuilt in the 1530s, with the architect Pietro Isabello among those involved, and the Lotto altarpiece was restored in 2014 and 2015.