Pinacoteca di Brera

This guide to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan centers on a small, strange canvas Andrea Mantegna's son tried to sell days after his father's death in 1506: a Christ figure painted in a radical foreshortened perspective. It follows the technique the artist used to make the distorted proportions read as real, and traces the painting's journey through a cardinal's collection and decades out of view before it resurfaced in Milan in the 1820s. Stand close to the canvas to see the optical trick Mantegna built it around.