La Résurrection du Christ

For most of a century this panel sat in storage at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, written off as a copy by a lesser hand. Then in 2018 a curator cataloguing the collection noticed something along the bottom edge, the tip of a gold cross on a banner whose pole had clearly been cut off. That meant the picture had once been larger and was later sawn in two, a common fate for old panels. He remembered another Mantegna, a Descent into Limbo in a private collection, in which Christ holds a bare pole with no banner. Set together, the rocks lined up and the banner completed itself. The two halves, painted around 1492, had been apart for perhaps 500 years, and the Bergamo picture was a Mantegna after all.