Mantegna lent a willing ear to these proposals, but his hands were full, and flattering as were Lodovico’s entreaties and assurances of good-will, he was slow to comply with the request. In his letters he assigns first one reason, then another, for delaying his departure. First, he asks for time to execute an order given him by Gregorio Corraro, Abbot of San Zeno of Verona, and protonotary to the Apostolic See. Then he begs for six months more to complete the work, then for another respite in order to do a little piece for the Podestà of Padua. The Marquis bore all these delays with unalterable patience and courtesy, while he never for a moment relaxed his efforts to bring the artist to Mantua, and redoubled his assurance of favour. If Andrea will only come, he says again and again, and himself prove the truth of the promises made to him, he will every day of his life find greater cause to rejoice that he has entered the service of the Gonzagas. When the summer of 1459 came and the protonotary’s altar-piece was still unfinished, Lodovico suggested as a last resource that the panels should be brought to Mantua and completed there. To this proposal the abbot was too wise a man to consent, and he would not even allow Mantegna to visit Mantua for a day until the picture had been safely delivered into his hands. This altar-piece, of which we hear so much in Lodovico’s correspondence with our master, was the “Madonna and Saints” in San Zeno, of Verona, taken to Paris in 1797, but now restored (without its predella) to its place, and one of the finest religious compositions that Andrea ever painted. All the chief characteristics of Andrea’s Paduan time are here brought together in a more elevated form, and for the first time we realise fully how great was the progress he had made since the days when he began to paint in the Eremitani Chapel. Nothing can exceed the simple dignity and grace of the youthful virgin, who sits erect under a portico decorated with a frieze of children bearing festoons of fruit, through which we see a thick growth of trees, and open space of blue sky beyond. On the pillars of the portico are medallions in which Andrea has after his usual habit introduced reliefs of classical subjects, one of which is a horse-tamer, evidently copied from the famous “Twins,” of Monte Cavallo, and curious as adopted by a painter who had not yet visited Rome. The saints who stand in the groups on either side of the Madonna’s throne are still too much treated as isolated figures, but each statue-like form has a grandeur of its own, and the graceful heads of the young St. John and St. Lawrence contrast finely with those of the aged apostles and fathers of the Church, while in the boy-angels who play on the steps of the throne, or sing with wide-parted lips, we have the first of those child-faces whose laughing eyes look down from many of Mantegna’s pictures and seem to give us a foretaste of Raphael’s sweetness.