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Battista Suardi was a member of a leading Bergamasque family. He was Lotto's patron in Trescore where he had built the oratory in 1501-02, and soon afterward had had the east wall, with its semicircular apse accommodating the altar, decorated by an anonymous and modestly gifted local painter. Lotto's task was to paint the other three walls, and the areas of ceiling between the exposed wooden beams that supported the roof.
Except for the framing arch of the apse and a dado molding running round the room at head height, the simple interior had no architectural articulation. Lotto divided the west and south walls into two main horizontal zones by adding fictive moldings, illusionistically designed to match the real one. He filled the upper frieze-like zone with a series of roundels containing alternating figures of prophets and sibyls, who look and lean out of their porthole-like frames and gesticulate energetically to one another, as if across the real space of the chapel. In the main zone Lotto created vertical subdivisions by putting in fictive pilasters, and, on the south wall, by using the two tall narrow windows.
This view is taken through the oratory toward the altar. To the left the north wall with the Legend of St Barbara, to the right the south wall with the Legend of St Brigid can be seen. The altar wall was decorated earlier by an anonymous and modestly gifted local painter.
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