Suardi Chapel

By this show of piety, the count hoped to avert a flood (predicted by astrologers for 20 February 1524)[2] and to counter the seeds of Lutheranism brought to northern Italy by the Landsknechts.

[5] Simple and rustic in its architecture, the chapel's plan is essentially rectangular with a pitched wooden roof supported by exposed beams and a small semicircular apse with some modest existing frescoes from before Lotto's time.

[7] Lotto also frescoed the ceiling between (and using) the beams, creating a fake pergola against a bright blue background, with playing putti and cartouches with biblical and liturgical passages about vines and wine as used in the mass.

Above these three figures is a dedicatory inscription, part of which is lost, with the commissioners' and the painter's names and the date along with the relevant passage from John 15.5 ("I am the Vine, you are the branches") in Latin in gilded letters.

That New Testament text is central to the iconography of the whole chapel, linking the Roman Catholic Church and the lives of saints Barbara, Brigid and Mary Magdalene to Christ in a clear anti-Lutheran polemic.

At either end harvesters with ladders and billhooks fail in their attempt to cut down the branches and fall from the sky[8] - these symbolise historical heretics and some are inscribed with their names.

[4] Either side of the figure of Christ are a series of buildings and landscapes, all showing scenes from the life of Saint Barbara, her conversion and her martyrdom under Maximian and Diocletian.

The saint flees to the mountains and hides in the bushes, but a shepherd betrays her and drags her by the hair to the praetor, who orders her to be whipped and tortured with upside-down hammers.

[6] The second square shows a landscape in which the saint gives out food to the needy, turns water into beer, heals a blind man, calms a hurricane, dries up a tree and tames a boar.

[4] On the ceiling is a peeing putto symbolising the saving water of baptism and of divine protection – according to alchemists of the time boys' urine had important properties as a "burning" liquid whose essence was fire.