Sacrifice of Isaac

Mantegna spent the last decades of his life as court painter to the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua, and this small picture stayed with that family for well over a century. It is painted in greys to imitate a carved relief, and it shows Abraham with the knife already raised over his son Isaac and the angel taking hold of his arm. Vienna dates it to around 1490 to 1495. The Gonzaga still had it in 1627, the year Duke Vincenzo II began selling the family gallery to Charles I of England, and it later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor in Brussels whose pictures are the core of the Vienna gallery. The museum records that its lower right corner has been cut away.