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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 shows the entrance side (south wall) and end wall in the rear. The various narrative scenes on the long entrance wall, depicted on a large scale in the foreground and a small scale in the landscape beyond, represent episodes from the life of St Brigid, an Irish nun venerated for her charitable activity on behalf of the poor and sick and, most appropriate in the context of the rural community of Trescore, as a protector of crops and farm animals against natural disasters. Thus, in the central section next to and above the doorway, the saint in her distinctive yellow habit is presented four times: in the left foreground she gives food (raw meat, which miraculously has failed to mark her habit) and drink (water miraculously transformed into beer) to two peasant women; to the right, she heals a blind man; in the left background she saves a flock of sheep from a wild boar; and in the right background she halts the advance of a devastating storm.
The scenes of the martyrdom of St Catherine of Alexandria and the communion of St Mary Magdalene are on the short wall (the west wall) opposite the altar. These scenes establish close parallel to motifs in the Barbara cycle: like Barbara, Catherine is beheaded; in both cases people are being burned nearby.
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