Saint James Led to His Execution

This fresco no longer exists. It covered part of a wall in the Ovetari Chapel of the Eremitani church in Padua, painted by Mantegna in the mid-1450s while he was still in his early twenties, and on 11 March 1944 Allied bombs hit the church and brought the chapel down. The painted plaster came off the walls as rubble. Around 80,000 fragments were gathered afterwards, roughly a tenth of the original painted surface. What survives as an image is a photograph. The Alinari firm had recorded the chapel in black and white before the war, and those plates now carry the composition, the Roman triumphal arch, the soldiers with their standard, the viewpoint Mantegna set so low that the scene reads as if it began above the head of anyone standing on the chapel floor. In 2006 the recovered fragments went back onto panels printed with those photographs, so the scene stands in Padua as a grey image with small patches of colour set into it.