Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore

This guide to Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore opens on the execution of Countess Bianca Maria di Challant in October 1526, convicted of talking a soldier into murdering one of her lovers. It moves to this dividing wall, once the barrier between cloistered Benedictine nuns and the public, and to Bernardino Luini's fresco of the beheading of Saint Catherine, painted only four years after the countess died. Milan gossip long insisted the painter borrowed her face for the doomed saint. Look for the grate cut into the wall where the nuns once watched Mass unseen.