São Marcos

This is the earliest painting we have by Andrea Mantegna, made when he was still a teenager. He had spent about six years in the Padua workshop of Francesco Squarcione, a painter who took in gifted boys and treated their labor and their earnings as his own. Mantegna broke free, going to court to do it, and around then he painted this Saint Mark for a Paduan confraternity. He set the evangelist behind a fictive stone window, leaning on the sill with a heavy red book beside him, as if a real figure had appeared in an opening cut into the wall. A slip of painted parchment carrying his name is fixed to the frame. The hard, sculptural precision that would define his whole career is already here.