Saint Euphemia

Euphemia was an early Christian martyr, said to have been thrown to wild animals and to have survived the beasts. Mantegna gives you the evidence plainly: a lion resting at her side, a sword run through her chest, and in her hands a lily and a palm for her purity and her death. He frames her in a stone archway hung with a heavy swag of fruit, the crisp classical architecture he loved all his life. He painted this in Padua, still a few years from the court post at Mantua that would occupy the rest of his career. He signed and dated it in Latin on a little scroll at the foot of the picture, in 1454, when he was barely into his twenties, one of the earliest works he ever put his name to.