Other trials came to sadden his old age. His son Francesco incurred the displeasure of the Marquis by some grave misconduct, and neither Andrea’s tears nor the intercession of Isabella could prevent his banishment from Mantua in 1505. This disgrace was a heavy blow to Andrea, who owned that his son had offended grievously, but thought that his fault might have been overlooked in consideration of his own services. “Messer Andrea,” wrote Isabella to her husband, “has just now been to see me, so full of tears and so altered in countenance that he seemed to me more dead than alive.” But his activity was undiminished, and, heavy as his heart might be, brain and hand were still the same as ever. We find him returning to a favourite subject of earlier days in the “St. Sebastian,” originally ordered by the Bishop of Mantua, but now in possession of the Scarpa family at La Motta, in Friuli. The life-sized figure, lean in proportions and suffering in expression, has a grandeur of its own. At the feet of the saint is a lighted candle, which sends a thin blue smoke upwards, and makes us wonder at its meaning, until we read the words on the scroll which hangs to the coral string above—_Nil nisi divinum stabile est, cætera fumus_. This, then, was the conclusion to which he had come at the end of that long life full of works and honour; this the conviction that old age and gathering troubles were forcing upon the mind of the great painter, who had seen so clearly and felt so keenly the beauty and the joy of life. In that same sad year of his son’s banishment he commenced another of the classic friezes which he loved to paint. This was the splendid composition known as the “Triumph of Scipio,” now in the National Gallery, which a wealthy Venetian named Francesco Cornaro ordered and paid for in part in 1505, but which, to his great indignation, was still in Andrea’s studio at the time of his death, when it was seized upon by creditors nearer at hand. The real subject of this work, executed in chiaroscuro on a background painted to imitate red marble, is the reception of Cybele among the deities of Rome. A colossal bust of the Phrygian goddess is borne in state into the presence of Scipio, who receives the messenger in consular array; while Claudia Quinta, a Roman lady, kneeling at his feet, welcomes the image with outstretched arms. Every gradation of movement is represented here, from the swift tread of the bearers on whose shoulders the goddess advances, to the motionless forms of the Roman soldiers who stand grouped around Scipio; and nothing is more striking than the skill with which the artist brings this rapid action by degrees to a complete pause. The general character of the piece, its costumes, figures, and draperies, all recall the “Triumphs.” It is, as it were, a last echo of the great composition whose harmonies still lingered on in Mantegna’s ears.