石切場の聖母

Mantegna painted this small panel around 1489, not long after a stay in Rome where he had steeped himself in ancient sculpture and architecture. It is barely larger than a sheet of paper, made to be carried and prayed to in private. The Madonna sits on bare rock with the sleeping child, and the whole picture rewards looking past them. On the hillside to the right, tiny stonecutters are quarrying a block, a column shaft, a slab, and what reads as a sarcophagus. For a 15th-century viewer those were not just workmen. The column pointed to the pillar of Christ's flagellation and the sarcophagus to his burial, the Passion quietly built into the landscape behind a sleeping baby. The rock the Virgin sits on may stand for Calvary itself. Off to the left there is an ordinary world too, a shepherd with his flock and farmers gathering hay under a road that winds up to a walled town.