The Resurrection

This panel was painted as part of the predella for the San Zeno Altarpiece (1456–1459), the monumental commission executed for the Basilica of San Zeno in Verona that established Mantegna's reputation across northern Italy. The predella's three narrative panels (the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and this Resurrection) were among the most carefully reasoned narrative sequences Mantegna ever produced; each scene treats Roman antiquity not as decorative backdrop but as the literal, credible world in which sacred history unfolded. Napoleon's troops removed the predella panels in 1797, and while the original Agony in the Garden and Resurrection panels remain in the Musée des Tours and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours respectively, the altarpiece itself has never been fully reunited. The Resurrection panel is therefore a work known primarily through its French museum context rather than its intended Veronese setting, which lends it a particular historical poignancy. Within the broader arc of quattrocento painting, Mantegna's insistence on treating the risen Christ as a figure inhabiting real, measurable space, rather than a flattened Byzantine icon, was a pivotal assertion of humanist theology rendered in paint.