“A musician must
make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately
at peace with himself.” - Abraham Maslow
For Art Sunday,
Andrea Mantegna (born 1431, Isola di Cartura, Republic of Venice; died Sept.
13, 1506, Mantua) painter and engraver, the first fully Renaissance artist of
northern Italy. His best known surviving work is the Camera degli Sposi (“Room
of the Bride and Groom”), or Camera Picta (“Painted Room”) (1474), in the
Palazzo Ducale of Mantua, for which he developed a self-consistent illusion of
a total environment. Mantegna’s other principal works include the Ovetari
Chapel frescoes (1448–55) in the Eremitani Church in Padua and the Triumph of
Caesar (begun c. 1486), the pinnacle of his late style.
Mantegna’s
extraordinary talent was recognised while he was still a boy. He was the second
son of a woodworker but was legally adopted by Francesco Squarcione by the time
he was 10 years old. Squarcione was a teacher of painting and a collector of
antiquities in Padua, and he drew the cream of young local talent to his studio.
In 1448, at age 17, Mantegna disassociated himself from Squarcione’s
guardianship to establish his own workshop in Padua, later claiming that
Squarcione had taken advantage of his talent. The award to Mantegna of the
important commission for an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia (1448),
now lost, demonstrates his precocity, since it was unusual for so young an
artist to receive such a commission. Mantegna himself proudly called attention
to his youthful ability in the painting’s inscription: “Andrea Mantegna from
Padua, aged 17, painted this with his own hand, 1448.”
In 1449,
Mantegna worked on the fresco decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the Eremitani
Church in Padua. The figures of Saints Peter, Paul, and Christopher in the
apse, his earliest frescoes in this chapel, show to what extent he had already
absorbed the monumental figure style of Tuscany. The environment of the city of
Padua, where Mantegna lived during the major formative years of his life (from
about age 10 to about age 30), exerted a strong influence on his interests,
ideas, painting style, and concept of himself. Padua was the first centre of
humanism in northern Italy, the home of a great university (founded in 1222),
and renowned as a centre for the study of medicine, philosophy, and
mathematics. With the influx of scholars from all over Europe and Italy, an
atmosphere of internationalism prevailed.
From the time of
the 14th-century poet Petrarch, Padua had experienced a rapidly growing revival
of interest in antiquity, and many eminent humanists and Latin scholars had
resided there. Increasing interest in and imitation of the culture of ancient
Rome produced a climate in which feverish collecting of antiquities and ancient
inscriptions (even if only in fragmentary form) flourished. Mantegna’s friendly
relations with several humanists, antiquarians, and university professors are a
matter of record, and hence he may be seen as one of the earliest Renaissance
artists to fraternise from a position of intellectual equality with such men. In
this way, Mantegna's lifestyle contributed to the early 16th-century ideal of
the artist as one so intimately familiar with antique history, mythology, and
literature as to be able to draw easily from these sources.
Mantegna lent
great impetus to the antique revival movement at mid-century. His starting
point had been a still earlier form of antique revival, the monumental Tuscan
figure style brought to Venice by the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno in
1442. His Venetian connections were strengthened by his marriage in 1453 to
Nicolosia, daughter of Jacopo Bellini and sister of Giovanni and Gentile
Bellini, who became the leading family of painters in Venice during the
following decade. Jacopo’s studies in perspective and drawings of fantastic
architectural settings based on antique architecture would have interested his
new son-in-law, who very likely had studied such drawings during his earlier
visit to Venice.
Though Mantegna
might have been expected to join the Bellini studio, he preferred to pursue his
independent practice in Padua, where the overwhelming artistic influence on him
for the preceding few years had come from the wealth of sculpture produced by
the Florentine Donatello for the high altar of San Antonio (finished by 1450). Mantegna
has been characterised as strongly jealous of his independence; yet by entering
the service of the Marchese di Mantova, Ludovico Gonzaga, in 1459, he was
forced to submit to limitations on his freedom of travel and acceptance of
commissions from other patrons. Despite such restrictions, Mantegna journeyed
to Florence and Pisa in 1466–67, where he renewed contact with works of art by
Donatello, Fra Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, and Andrea del Castagno.
During the
decade 1460–70, Mantegna produced his finest small-scale works. The Gonzaga
patronage provided Mantegna a fixed income and the opportunity to create what
became his best-known surviving work, the so-called “Camera degli Sposi” in the
Palazzo Ducale at Mantua. Earlier practitioners of 15th-century perspective
delimited a rectangular field as a transparent window onto the world and
constructed an imaginary space behind its front plane. In the “Camera degli
Sposi”, however, Mantegna constructed a system of homogeneous decoration on all
four walls of the room, mainly by means of highly realistic painted
architectural elements on walls and ceilings, which from ground level
convincingly imitate three-dimensionally extended shapes. Though the ceiling is
flat, it appears concave. Mantegna transformed the small interior room into an
elegant open-air pavilion, to which the room’s real and fictitious occupants
were transported from deep within an essentially medieval urban castle. Directly
above the centre of the room is a painted oculus, or circular opening to the
sky, with putti (nude, chubby child figures) and women around a balustrade in
dramatically foreshortened perspective (shown above). The strong vertical axis
created by the oculus locates the spectator at a single point in the centre of
the room, the point from which the observer's space blends with that of the
frescoed figures.
The realism of
the perspective handling of the oculus made it the most influential
illusionistic di sotto in su ceiling
decoration of the early Renaissance. Its implications for the future of ceiling
decoration were largely unrealised, however, until the time of Correggio, a
major northern Italian painter of the early 16th century, who employed the same
type of illusionism in a series of domes in Parma (Italy).
While at the
Gonzaga court, Mantegna attained a position of great respect. His close
relations with his patron Ludovico were a unique phenomenon at such an early
date. As one might expect, the signatures of Mantegna’s paintings reveal intense
pride in his accomplishments as a painter. Other than that there are only a few
legal records of disputes with his neighbours (from which Ludovico had to
rescue him) to provide tentative evidence for the painter’s irascible and
contentious personality during his later years. Ludovico died in 1478, followed
soon after by Mantegna’s son Bernardino, who had been expected to carry on his
father’s studio. Mantegna’s financial situation was so bad that, in 1484, he
was forced to ask for help from the powerful Florentine merchant prince Lorenzo
de’ Medici and even contemplated moving to Florence. But Ludovico’s son
Federico outlived his father by only a few years, and, with the accession of
young Francesco II in 1484, the financial conditions of patronage improved.
Though many of
Mantegna’s works for the Gonzaga family were subsequently lost, the remains of
nine canvases depicting a Roman triumphal procession, the “Triumph of Caesar”,
begun about 1486 and worked on for several years, still exist. In these
paintings, reflecting the classical tastes of his new patron, Francesco,
Mantegna reached the peak of his late style. Perhaps it was this new
imaginative synthesis of the colour, splendour, and ritualistic power of
ancient Rome that brought about Pope Innocent VIII’s commission to decorate his
private chapel in the Belvedere Palace in Rome (destroyed 1780), which Mantegna
carried out in 1488–90.
Notwithstanding
ill health and advanced age, Mantegna worked intensively during the remaining
years of his life. In 1495 Francesco ordered the “Madonna of the Victory”
(1496) to commemorate his supposed victory at the Battle of Fornovo. In the
last years of his life, Mantegna painted the Parnassus (1497), a picture
celebrating the marriage of Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga in 1490, and
Wisdom Overcoming the Vices (1502) for Isabella’s studiolo (a small room in the
Gonzaga palace at Mantua embellished with fine paintings and carvings of
mythological subjects intended to display the erudition and advanced taste of
its patron). A third canvas intended for this program, with the legend of the
god Comus, was unfinished when Mantegna died and was completed by his successor
at the Gonzaga court, Lorenzo Costa.
A funerary
chapel in the church of S. Andrea at Mantua was dedicated to Mantegna’s memory.
Decorated with frescoes, including a dome painted (possibly by Correggio) with
paradise symbols related to Mantegna’s Madonna of the Victory, it was finished
in 1516. No other 15th-century artist was dignified by having a funerary chapel
dedicated to him in the major church of the city where he worked, which attests
to the high stature Mantegna came to enjoy in his adopted city.
