The two paintings by Cariani depicting Santa Caterina and Santo Stefanos came to the Carrara Academy in 1866 from the collection of Guglielmo Lochis, who had purchased them in 1837, but were painted for an altar in the parish church of Locatello in Valle Imagna, in the province of Bergamo. The San Giacomo Maggiore belonged to the same complex, kept around the middle of the nineteenth century in the Petrobelli collection in Bergamo, where it probably remained until the death of Antonio Petrobelli (1864), son of Lodovico, who had begun the dispersion of his father's collection a few years earlier. . In the twentieth century the traces of this third painting became uncertain: reported between the two wars in the collection of Italico Brass in Venice, in 1975 it was presented by the antiquarian Pietro Scarpa at the Biennale dell'Antiquariato in Florence.

After almost two centuries, it is possible to reunite the San Giacomo with the companion paintings of the Carrara Academy, restored for the occasion, and to recompose in the museum rooms the triptych painted by the Bergamo painter for Locatello between 1528 and 1530.
The initiative makes it possible to recover a work of Cariani's maturity and to add a small piece to the knowledge of a little-known season of the artist who, trained in Venice in the shadow of Giorgione and alongside Sebastiano del Piombo, was a protagonist of the mainland Venetian painting.