Camera picta - The Meeting

This scene covers one wall of a small room in the Gonzaga palace that Mantegna spent about nine years painting, finishing in 1474. It shows Ludovico Gonzaga, lord of Mantua, walking out to meet his son Francesco, who had been made a cardinal in Rome while still in his teens. That appointment was a real coup for a family whose fortune had been built on soldiering for hire, and the fresco quietly trades on it. Mantegna set the men life-size and close to us, as if the wall had opened straight onto the court. Behind the reunion he painted a make-believe city bristling with ancient monuments, a stand-in for the Rome the young cardinal was riding home from.