Bust of Andrea Mantegna

In 1504, Mantegna bought the right to the first chapel on the left in the church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua for setting up his own funerary chapel. With his son Francesco, who was also a painter, he decorated the chapel’s vault with a fictive pergola of garlands that frame the Mantegna family coat-of-arms. The chapel contains a magnificent bronze bust set before a porphyry disk decorated with a refined marble frame. This splendid work may have been executed by Cavalli, the goldsmith friend of Mantegna, but its attribution remains one of the unanswered questions of the Renaissance in Mantua.