Une sibylle et un prophète

Mantegna spent his last decades as court artist to the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua, a small state with a taste for the ancient world but no marble quarries and few sculptors of its own. So he faked sculpture with paint. This panel is worked almost entirely in shades of grey and touched with real gold, made to look like a slab of gilded bronze relief catching the light. Two figures share a long scroll and argue over it in a classical doorway. Who they are has never been settled: an old prophet with a sibyl, perhaps, or the biblical Esther and Mordecai, or a Roman sibyl selling her books of prophecy to a king. It may be a fragment of something larger, possibly made for the private study of Isabella d'Este, the Mantuan duchess whose collecting was famous across Italy.