Ambrogio Bergognone, The Virgin and Child with Saints

We are clearly looking into heaven in this painting. The Virgin Mary sits on a carved and gilded throne, the Christ Child standing on her lap. On either side are two saints, identified by the gilded inscriptions on their haloes: Catherine of Alexandria, dressed as a princess, and Catherine of Siena, in the habit of a Dominican nun. The figures are linked by their hands: the Virgin holds Catherine of Siena’s hand, while Christ places a ring on Catherine of Alexandria’s finger (the saint had a vision of herself as a ‘bride of Christ’ and, because of this, refused to marry the Roman emperor).

This kind of composition is known as a sacra conversazione (‘holy conversation’). The Virgin, Christ and the saints are shown in a single unified space rather than split between different parts of a polyptych. These still, calm figures painted in bright colours and lit with a clear light are characteristic of Ambrogio Bergognone. Although he was a contemporary of radical High Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, who was also in Milan from about 1482, Bergognone’s almond-eyed virgins with their silvery skin tones hark back to Lombard painting of an earlier era, in particular the work of Vincenzo Foppa, with whom he perhaps trained.

Although Bergognone seems to have been unaffected by Leonardo’s dramatic compositional and atmospheric effects – the work couldn‘t be more different to ’The Virgin of the Rocks' – this is very much a painting of the High Renaissance. Bergognone was fascinated with the kind of perspectival effects which had arrived in Milan with the painter and architect Bramante in the early 1480s. To fool us into seeing a three-dimensional space on a flat panel, he has made it seem as if we are looking up into a Renaissance loggia (an open-sided gallery or room) – you can see its coffered ceiling and the receding curves of its lateral arches with their different coloured stones. The same interests appear in the works of his Milanese contemporary Andrea Solario, and more widely in Italian painting, for example The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli. Like Crivelli, Bergognone played spatial games with his viewers: Saint Catherine’s wheel teeters on the edge of the marble step, as if about to tumble off into our world, just like the fruit in Crivelli’s Annunciation.

This painting was one of ten Bergognone made for the Certosa (Charterhouse) of Pavia in the late 1480s and early 1490s, including probably The Virgin and Child. It presumably hung in the fifth chapel off the left aisle of the nave, which is dedicated to Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Catherine of Siena. There was originally more to the altarpiece than this single panel; it has lost its frame, which would have covered the arch of unpainted wood around the top, and its crowning lunette, which showed the dead Christ on the lap of the Virgin. The lunette was bought by the National Gallery at the same time as the main panel but was lost at sea while being shipped to England in 1860.