Altman Madonna

Andrea Mantegna a famous Italian painter worked on the portrait of Altman Madonna also called the Holy Family with Saint Mary Magdalene between 1495 and 1505.

He painted this art on a canvas using glue tempera medium. This method brought a strong definitional form of freshness and clarity. The canvas painting dimension is 22.5 in by 18.0 in. The artist observed the nature together with his influencers, like his teacher who told him the secret behind painting was to go through fragments of Rome sculpture. The Florentine artists like Donatello also influenced him a lot. The knowledge of mixing colour and getting a unique blend was gotten from his brother in law Giovanni Bellini. His mastery in colour painting is seen to mature as in this portrait the paints bring out the exact theme.

The style used in this painting is the same artistic skills he used when he was working on his early work like that in Trivulzio Madonna portrait. The fruity style incorporated on the background looks like the ones in Madonna della Vittoria and Trivulzio Madonna portrait shows how he did his studies in nature and how he fixes this skill in his paintings. He balanced between colour and graphics that enabled him to get to his aim which was optical illusion. The work on the Holy Family with Saint Mary Magdalene also had some similarities with a portrait by Marco Boschini of the Holy Family with a Female Saint that is housed in Ospedale degli Incurabili in Venice.

The use of glue tempera technique made the portrait outstanding from those of the other painters who had embraced the oil painting method. In the year 1902 it was sold in London to an English antiquarian by Neapolitan count called Agosto d'Aiuti. This Christian art done by Mantegna showed his feeling in religious beliefs. In this portrait there is a combination of sombreness and sweetness, this was inspired from funerary reliefs of Rome. The portrait has passed so many owners since it was created in Gonzaga court in Mantua where the original painting effect would have been maintained and cleaning done to it, this has made the original effect to disappear. After staying with the portrait of Altman Madonna for one year in 1913, Benjamin Altman a collector from America bestowed it to Metropolitan Museum art in New York where it is kept up to today.