Half-length groupings of the Holy Family with an additional saint, painted at a scale suited to a private room rather than a church wall, became increasingly common in Italian painting through the second half of the fifteenth century. They let a patron keep a small, close image for daily prayer, distinct from the large public altarpieces the same painters produced for churches and confraternities. Mantegna, whose reputation by mid-century rested on sophisticated perspective and unusual, closely observed viewpoints, applied that same precision to these more intimate subjects^[1].

Mantegna entered Squarcione's Padua workshop as a child and was admitted to the painters' guild within a year, leaving to work independently by seventeen^[1]. Donatello's presence in Padua from 1443, carving the high altar of Sant'Antonio, gave Mantegna a working example of anatomically correct, sculpturally weighted figures, a quality that carried through his career regardless of scale or subject^[1]. In 1453 he married Nicolosia Bellini, linking him by marriage to Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, and the three painters influenced one another's handling of perspective and colour in these years^[1].