Pairing the Madonna and Child with Elizabeth and the infant John the Baptist draws on the Gospel account of the Visitation, in which the pregnant Elizabeth and the pregnant Mary meet and Elizabeth's own child, the future John the Baptist, is said to have leapt in her womb in recognition of Christ. Painters extended that family bond into later scenes showing the two children together as infants, with Joseph and sometimes Zacharias present as the fathers. It let a patron commission an image with more narrative and familial warmth than a Madonna and Child alone, while remaining a compact, intimate subject.

Mantegna was apprenticed to Francesco Squarcione as a child, admitted to Padua's painters' guild within a year, and left to run his own workshop by seventeen^[1]. Padua's enthusiasm for classical antiquity shaped his archaeological precision, and Donatello's example, working on the high altar of Sant'Antonio from 1443, gave him a model for anatomically correct, sculpturally solid figures^[1]. That combination, precise perspective and carved, weighted figures, is the throughline across Mantegna's devotional paintings regardless of which saints are grouped around the Madonna and Child.

A painting titled Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Joseph is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection. It is documented there as the work of a different painter, not Mantegna. The overlapping title makes it easy to conflate the two paintings, but they are separate works by separate artists, and this page concerns only the painting attributed to Mantegna.