Andrea Mantegna

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrea Mantegna was born around 1431 in Isola di Carturo, a small settlement near Padua, the son of a carpenter named Biagio. By the age of eleven he was already apprenticed to a painter. By the time he died in Mantua on the 13th of September 1506, he had reshaped how European artists thought about space, stone, and the power of ancient Rome. The questions worth asking about Mantegna are not simply about his paintings. They are about a man who was simultaneously a painter, an engraver, an archaeologist, and a collector. They are about a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500. And they are about a legacy so durable that his tradition of ceiling decoration was followed for almost three centuries after his death.

• 2. Padua and Squarcione

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  Francesco Squarcione, whose original profession was tailoring, had built one of the most remarkable art schools in fifteenth-century Italy. Established around 1440, his workshop attracted as many as 137 painters and students, drawing talent not only from the Veneto but from Tuscany as well. Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, and Donatello all passed through Padua. Squarcione had traveled through Italy and possibly Greece, collecting antique statues, reliefs, and vases, then making his collection available for students to study. He also taught Latin, and he instructed Mantegna specifically to study fragments of Roman sculpture.

  Mantegna was said to be Squarcione's favorite pupil, but the relationship curdled. At seventeen, Mantegna left the workshop, and he later claimed that Squarcione had profited from his labor without adequate payment. Squarcione, for his part, attacked the young artist's earliest frescoes with a pointed remark recorded by Giorgio Vasari: he said the figures were "like men made of stone" and should have been painted stone color to be nearer perfection, since they had no resemblance to life. The irony, as Vasari himself observed, was that it was Squarcione's own love of ancient Roman art that had pushed Mantegna in exactly that direction.

  Mantegna's first documented work was an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia in 1448, now lost. That same year he was called to work on the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the transept of Sant'Agostino degli Eremitani. After a series of coincidences, he finished most of the work alone. The resulting fresco cycle, including the worm's-eye view composition of St. James Led to His Execution, was almost entirely destroyed in the Allied bombings of Padua in 1944.

• 3. Stone, Drapery, and Perspective

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  Mantegna openly stated that he considered ancient art superior to nature, finding it more selective and disciplined in form. This was not mere posturing. He studied reproduced castings of Roman sculptures at Squarcione's studio, and he later modeled clay figures himself to capture human anatomy before painting it. His draperies, tightly folded and closely pressed to the body, were reportedly studied from actual models draped in paper and fabrics stiffened with glue.

  The result was a distinctive style that critics struggled to categorize. His figures are slim, muscular, and bony. Their energy is arrested rather than flowing, tense rather than graceful. The landscapes around them are tawny and gritty with pebbles. His art leaned toward rigidity, demonstrating what observers called an austere wholeness rather than graceful sensitivity of expression. He adopted the wet drapery patterns of Roman sculpture, which the Romans had themselves borrowed from Greek invention, for the clothing of his figures. The tense physical interactions between those figures, however, derived from Donatello.

  Perspective was a tool Mantegna used with ambition rather than mechanical precision. His mastery was not always mathematically correct, but it achieved what contemporaries found astonishing. One of his consistent strategies was to lower the horizon line, creating a sense of greater monumentality in his figures. The preliminary sketch for the St. Stephen fresco survives, and it reveals something unexpected: the nude figures planned in the sketch were later painted as clothed, making this the earliest known preliminary drawing that can be compared directly to its finished fresco. The sketch also shows the perspective at a more conventional stage, less developed than the final work.

• 4. The Gonzaga Court

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  Marquis Ludovico III Gonzaga had been pressing Mantegna to enter his service for some time before the arrangement was finalized in 1460. The salary agreed was 75 lire a month, a figure so large for that period that it signaled, plainly, how highly the court valued him. Mantegna was the first painter of any real eminence to be based in Mantua.

  His Mantuan masterpiece was a series of full fresco compositions painted for the apartment of the castle, today known as the Camera degli Sposi, or Wedding Chamber, in the Palazzo Ducale. The frescoes include portraits of various members of the Gonzaga family alongside figures of genii and attendants. The decoration was presumably finished in 1474. The spatial construction of the room, particularly the painted oculus in the ceiling, had a profound effect on Antonio da Correggio.

  The decade that followed was difficult. Mantegna grew irritable. His son Bernardino died. The Marchese Ludovico died, then his wife Barbara, then his successor Federico, who had bestowed on Mantegna the title of cavaliere, or knight. Commissions resumed only with the arrival of Francesco II of the House of Gonzaga. During this quieter stretch, Mantegna built a substantial house near the church of San Sebastiano, finished the intense St. Sebastian now in the Louvre, and collected ancient Roman busts. He gave that collection, at least in part, to Lorenzo de' Medici when the Florentine leader visited Mantua in 1483.

  In 1488, Pope Innocent VIII summoned Mantegna to paint frescoes in a chapel at the Belvedere in the Vatican. The series included a Baptism of Christ that was later destroyed by Pius VI in 1780. The pope treated Mantegna with less generosity than the Mantuan court had, and Mantegna's overall impression of Rome was a disappointing one, despite his careful study of the city's ancient monuments. He also met the famous Turkish hostage Jem during his time there. He returned to Mantua in 1490.

• 5. Triumphs and Isabella

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  The nine tempera pictures of the Triumphs of Caesar are considered Mantegna's finest work. Probably begun before his departure for Rome, they were finished around 1492. The compositions are packed with classical learning and the splendor of their subject matter. In 1628 they were sold, along with the bulk of the Mantuan art treasures, to King Charles I of England.

  Mantegna's relationship with the new Marchesa, Isabella d'Este, was cultured but not always smooth. After 1497, Isabella commissioned him to translate mythological themes written by the court poet Paride Ceresara into paintings for her private apartment, the studiolo, in the Palazzo Ducale. One of those paintings, the legend of the god Comus, was left unfinished by Mantegna and completed by Lorenzo Costa, his successor as court painter. The other painters Isabella commissioned for the studiolo were Perugino and Correggio.

  An earlier encounter had been blunter. In 1493, Isabella sat for a portrait by Mantegna and was dissatisfied with the result. She recorded her opinion plainly: "the painter did it so badly that it has no features like our own."

  Another late commission came from Francesco Gonzaga himself. The Madonna della Vittoria, now in the Louvre, was painted in tempera around 1495 to commemorate the Battle of Fornovo. Francesco Gonzaga was eager to present that battle's uncertain outcome as a victory for the Italian League. The church built to house the painting was designed by Mantegna himself. The composition shows the Madonna surrounded by saints, the archangel Michael, and St. Maurice, all sheltering the kneeling Francesco Gonzaga beneath her extended mantle.

• 6. The Engraver's Workshop

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  Mantegna never signed or dated his engraved plates, with one disputed exception from 1472. His history as an engraver is therefore partly obscure. Giorgio Vasari claimed that Mantegna began engraving in Rome, prompted by the work of the Florentine Baccio Baldini after Sandro Botticelli. This is now considered unlikely, since it would confine all of Mantegna's substantial body of prints to the last sixteen or seventeen years of his life, a period too short to account for the range of styles they display.

  He and his workshop engraved approximately thirty plates by the usual reckoning, though scholars now consider that Mantegna himself may have personally engraved as few as seven, or possibly none. Another artist from the workshop who produced several plates is generally identified as Giovanni Antonio da Brescia. The subjects include Battle of the Sea Monsters, Virgin and Child, a Bacchanal Festival, Hercules and Antaeus, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, the Entombment, the Resurrection, and scenes from the Triumph of Julius Caesar after his own paintings.

  The technique is distinctive. Forms are strongly marked, and shadows are produced through parallel hatching: the closer the parallel lines, the darker the shadow. Prints from the workshop are frequently found in two states. In the first, they were produced by roller or hand pressing, and the ink is weak. In the second, a printing press was used, and the impression is stronger. The workshop was, by any measure, the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500. Neither Mantegna nor his workshop are now believed to have produced the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi cards.

• 7. Legacy

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  Albrecht Dürer was influenced by Mantegna's style during his two trips to Italy, going so far as to reproduce several of his engravings. Leonardo da Vinci took from Mantegna the specific decorative motif of festoons and fruit. Giovanni Bellini, in his earlier works, clearly followed the lead of his brother-in-law Andrea. Mantegna's main legacy is considered the introduction of spatial illusionism in both frescoes and sacra conversazione paintings.

  Correggio built directly on Mantegna's perspective research, eventually producing the dome of the Cathedral of Parma. That lineage traces back to the faint painted oculus of the Camera degli Sposi. The tradition of ceiling decoration that Mantegna pioneered continued for almost three centuries.

  In his final years, personal difficulties accumulated. After the death of his wife, Mantegna fathered an illegitimate son named Giovanni Andrea. His son Francesco was banished from Mantua after incurring the displeasure of the Marchese. Financial strain forced Mantegna to part with a beloved antique bust of Faustina. He died shortly after. In 1516, his sons erected a monument to him in the church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua, where he had painted the altarpiece of the mortuary chapel. The dome of that church was decorated by Correggio.