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In 1460 Andrea Mantegna became court painter to the Gonzaga family, rulers of Mantua, a position he held for the rest of his life, an unusual arrangement in an age when most Italian painters moved between commissions and cities. Between 1465 and 1474 he decorated a single room in the ducal palace, the Camera degli Sposi, with frescoes of the Gonzaga family, their courtiers, horses and dogs, wrapped inside painted architecture that seems to open the walls onto real loggias and sky.

The ceiling was the boldest part, an oval opening painted straight overhead and ringed with figures and putti leaning over a painted balustrade as if looking down at the room's real occupants, one of the first times a painter had tried that kind of steep foreshortening on such a scale.

He pushed the same trick further decades later in the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, a small panel showing Christ's body from the feet up, foreshortened so sharply that the torso and head shrink into the distance while the wounded feet fill the foreground. Mantegna had married into Venice's leading painting family in 1453, to Nicolosia Bellini, sister of the painter Giovanni Bellini, tying Mantua's court painter directly to the workshop shaping Venice's next generation of art.