The Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint John the Baptist

Andrea Mantegna spent his last decades as court painter to the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua, and this comes from near the end of that time, around 1497. The Virgin sits under a red cloth between two saints. On one side John the Baptist holds his slender cross. On the other Mary Magdalene lifts a small jar of the ointment she would use on Christ's dead body. So the tenderness here already carries the ending, the mother resting her head against the child she will lose. Mantegna painted it in a glue-based paint on cloth rather than on a wooden panel, which meant he could roll it up in Mantua and send it wherever it was wanted.