Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist as a Child

Mantegna made this small Holy Family late in his life, around 1495 to 1500, when he had already served the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua as court painter for some 35 years. It was meant for private prayer, not a public altar, and he builds it that way: the heads crowd forward into a shallow, dim space, close enough to touch, with Joseph behind the Virgin and Child and, on the other side, Elizabeth with the infant John the Baptist. He liked this dense, half-length arrangement enough to return to it repeatedly. Related versions of the same tight family group survive in Verona, Paris and Turin, worked up in his own hand and by his workshop in the last years before his death in 1506.