Дидона

Andrea Mantegna loved the ancient world so much that he sometimes painted as if he were carving it. This Dido is done in grey monochrome with touches of gold, made to look like a figure of gilded bronze set against veined green marble, a painted imitation of an antique relief. Dido, the queen of Carthage, stands before the funeral pyre she has built from the belongings of Aeneas, the Trojan who loved her and then sailed off to found Rome. She holds his sword, the one she will fall on before the flames take her. Mantegna made her near the end of his life, working for the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua. She had a companion piece, a Judith now in the same Montreal museum, and two more heroines of antiquity that are today in London.