Works by Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna studied the remains of ancient Rome, and his figures look almost carved, with tight, close-folded drapery, bony limbs and hard, pebbly ground.

Apprenticed at eleven to the Paduan painter Francesco Squarcione, who collected antique statues, Mantegna was set to study fragments of Roman sculpture, and left at seventeen. Squarcione later sneered that the people in his St James frescoes in Padua were like stone men and ought to have been marble-coloured. In Samson and Delilah, of 1495, the figures are painted stone grey: Delilah bends over the sleeping Samson under a vine, against a ground of red and green streaked like veined marble.

The Agony in the Garden, from the 1450s, puts Christ on a ledge of layered rock while three disciples sleep below and soldiers approach along a road, a walled city behind. From 1460 he was court artist to the Gonzaga in Mantua. In the Madonna della Vittoria, of 1495–96, which marks the Battle of Fornovo, Francesco Gonzaga kneels in armour under the Virgin's outspread mantle, beneath a bower hung with fruit and coral. The late Adoration of the Magi, in distemper on linen, packs the figures close against a dark ground, a crowding drawn from his study of Roman reliefs; one king offers gold coins in a Chinese porcelain cup.

His workshop led print production in Venice before 1500, but how many plates he engraved himself is disputed: perhaps seven, perhaps none. Most works below are sacred or mythological.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery, Louvre.