Triptychon

In the early 1460s Andrea Mantegna was the newly arrived court painter to Ludovico Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua, and these three small panels were made for the private chapel inside the Gonzaga castle. Letters between Mantegna and Ludovico from April 1464 mention the chapel pictures. Look closely and the panels do not quite match. Each has its own shape and seems lit from a different direction, which is one reason some historians doubt they were ever meant to hang as the single altarpiece you see now. That arrangement, with its gilded frame, was assembled only in 1827. The panels had a rough history in between, turning up in 1587 cut apart among the belongings of a Medici cousin near Pistoia.