The Infant Savior

The Infant Savior shows the young Christ standing upright, a narrow vertical panel in which Andrea Mantegna sets his sculptural, sharply drawn linearism at the service of a tender devotional image. Mantegna, the great theorist of the Renaissance veneration of antiquity, was equally at home in the antiquarian grandeur of his Paduan altarpieces and in intimate works such as this, painted about 1460 in tempera on canvas. The solemn, monumentalised child anticipates by decades the more famous standing Saviors of the High Renaissance.