Judit con la cabeza de Holofernes

In the last decade of his life, around 1497, Mantegna kept returning to a strange kind of painting, pictures made in greys and browns to look exactly like carved stone reliefs, as though a piece of ancient sculpture had been set against coloured marble. This is one of them. It shows the Old Testament heroine Judith, who has just killed the enemy general Holofernes to save her besieged town, calmly lowering his severed head into a bag held open by her maid. Mantegna had spent his career steeped in the art of ancient Rome, and these monochrome panels let him play scholar and sculptor at once. The courts of Italy prized them highly. He paints the maidservant, unusually for his time, as a woman of colour.