Judith

Mantegna painted this around 1495, and the first trick is that it pretends not to be a painting at all. Working in grey monochrome, a technique called grisaille, he makes the two women look carved from pale stone and set against coloured marble, like a fragment of an ancient relief. The subject is the biblical heroine Judith, who has just cut off the head of the enemy general Holofernes and is calmly tucking it into a bag her maid holds open. Mantegna spent his career as court painter to the Gonzaga family in Mantua, a household that kept African servants, and he paints the maid as a Black woman, an unusually direct observation from life for the 1490s. The whole thing is small, barely taller than a hand span, made to be held and admired up close.