Nativity

The painting is set in a landscape delimited on the left by a building, perhaps a stable, with a wooden and straw roof, inside of which you can distinguish the male figure of a Dominican monk. Outside, in front of the stable, Mary and Joseph are kneeling in fornt of the Child, portrayed from behind and as if he wanted to get up to go to his Mother. Behind the Holy Family there's a column with a historiated base that seems to support the entire composition. The right part of the painting is characterized by three different scenes: in the first one there's a group of soldiers at the foot of a hill on which the silhouette of a castle stands out, a broken toothed wheel and a female figure kneeling back to a soldier who is about to hit her with a sword. This scene tells the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria who was sentenced to die with the torture of the toothed wheel. The instrument of torture broke, then she was beheaded, but from her head flowed milk instead of blood, which is a symbol of her purity. The second scene is set on the top of another wooded hill where St. Catherine from Siena, a Dominican nun, receives the Sacred Stigmata from a fiery crucifix that hovers in the sky. While the third scene concernes St. Peter's martyrdom; he was murdered by assassins with a sickle, while walking from Como to Milan.