The Triumphs of Caesar: 1. The Picture-Bearers

Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar: The Picture-Bearers (Canvas 1) initiates the nine-canvas processional sequence with servants carrying painted images of the cities, battles, and victories commemorated in Caesar's triumph — a picture-within-picture that raises questions about representation and reality that were of acute interest to Renaissance theorists of painting. The images held aloft by the bearers are themselves paintings, and Mantegna's meta-pictorial opening move introduces the triumph's entire subject matter — the visual documentation of military achievement — as the procession's first element.

The painted boards carried by the bearers show miniature battle scenes and city views rendered within the larger composition, a virtuosic display of painting at multiple scales. The bearers' straining postures and the boards' perspective angles are calculated with the precision of an engineering drawing.