Monogram of Christ between two saints

This battered lunette is the earliest painting by Mantegna that survives, dated 1452, when he was only about 21 and still making his name in Padua. He frescoed it above a doorway of the great basilica of Saint Anthony, showing two saints who hold up the monogram of Christ, the letters IHS inside a blazing sun. That emblem was topical. It was the badge of Bernardino of Siena, a wandering preacher who had pressed crowds across Italy to honor the name of Jesus, and who had been made a saint just two years before, in 1450. He stands beside Anthony, Padua's own patron. Time has worn the figures badly, and the fresco was later lifted from the wall and moved into the basilica's museum.