A Woman Drinking

Mantegna spent most of his life as court painter to the Gonzaga family in Mantua, a small Italian court obsessed with the ancient world and its coins, marbles and bronzes. He caught the fever himself. This panel imitates a relief of gilded bronze set against veined marble, the whole thing worked in egg tempera touched with gold. It was a kind of boast, that paint could copy a sculptor's bronze so closely the eye is fooled. The woman lifting the cup is thought to be Sophonisba, a noblewoman of Carthage who, Roman writers said, drank poison rather than be led through the streets of Rome as a prize of war. It was probably made with a companion panel of a Roman priestess, perhaps for the private study of Isabella d'Este, one of the great collectors of the Renaissance.