A Sagrada Família com Santa Maria Madalena

Andrea Mantegna spent most of his life as court painter to the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua, surrounded by the Roman antiquities he loved to collect and study, and it shows in this late work from around 1495. He crowds the Virgin, Joseph, the Christ Child and Mary Magdalen tightly into the frame, heads close together, their forms so firmly modelled they look almost carved. Scholars think he took the idea from ancient Roman funerary reliefs, where family members are packed shoulder to shoulder in stone. He worked here not in oil but in distemper, pigment bound with glue, which dries matte and let him build up these crisp, sculptural edges. The whole scene is barely two feet across.