Mantegna's work up to his appointment as Gonzaga court painter in 1460 was, in his biographers' own summary, predominantly religious: altarpieces and devotional panels for churches and confraternities in and around Padua and the wider Veneto^[1]. He built his early reputation on a combination of sophisticated perspective, unusual viewpoints, and a hard, sculptural treatment of drapery and anatomy learned in part from Donatello's Paduan work^[1]. A multi-panel altarpiece from this period would have been produced for a specific church or institution, following the conventions of the polyptych format still common in the mid-fifteenth century Veneto: a central image flanked by standing saints, often within a unified architectural framework that Mantegna, with his interest in perspective, would have used to knit the panels together.

Mantegna was apprenticed to Francesco Squarcione at around ten years old and was unusually admitted to the Padua painters' guild within a year, though he broke from Squarcione's workshop by the age of seventeen to work independently^[1]. From 1443 Donatello worked in Padua on the high altar of Sant'Antonio, and Mantegna absorbed from him a way of building the human figure as if it were carved: solid, weighted, and correctly proportioned in a way few Paduan painters had achieved before him^[1]. This is the formation that stands behind any altarpiece Mantegna produced in these years, giving even static, frontal saints a sense of physical mass.