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(b Isola di Carturo, nr Padua, 1430-31; d Mantua 13 Sept 1506). Italian painter and printmaker. He occupies a pre-eminent position among Italian artists of the 15th century. The profound enthusiasm for the civilization of ancient Rome that infuses his entire oeuvre was unprecedented in a painter. In addition to its antiquarian content, his art is characterized by brilliant compositional solutions, the bold and innovative use of perspective and foreshortening and a precise and deliberate manner of execution, an aspect that was commented upon during his lifetime. He was held in great esteem by his contemporaries for his learning and skill and, significantly, he is the only artist of the period to have left a small corpus of self-portraits: two in the Ovetari Chapel; his presumed self-portrait in the Presentation in the Temple (Berlin, Gem?ldegal.); one in the Camera Picta (Mantua, Pal. Ducale) and the funerary bust in his burial chapel in S Andrea, Mantua, designed and probably executed by himself. His printmaking activity is technically advanced and of great importance, although certain aspects of the execution remain to be clarified. Due to the survival of both the Paduan and Mantuan archives Mantegna is one of the best-documented artists of the 15th century.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
| Biography: Andrea Mantegna |
Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1430-1506), painter and engraver, was the leading artist of the school of Padua and one of the most important early Renaissance Italian masters.
Andrea Mantegna, the son of the carpenter Biagio, was born at Isola di Carturo about halfway between Padua and Vicenza. The inscription on a lost altarpiece he executed (the inscription was preserved in written records) in 1447 states that the artist was 17. His name appeared on the painters' roll for Padua between 1441 and 1445 as an apprentice and adopted son of Francesco Squarcione. It was not unusual for childless masters to adopt promising apprentices. In 1448 Mantegna left Squarcione's household and established himself as an independent artist.
Seven years later Mantegna went to court to dissolve their relationship. He declared that he had earned more than 400 ducats for Squarcione and sued for reimbursement of the money. Squarcione contested Mantegna's suit, citing an agreement they had signed in 1448 in Venice. The court awarded Mantegna 200 ducats and denounced the 1448 agreement. These accounts suggest that Mantegna was responsible for a substantial number of paintings while serving in Squarcione's studio and, furthermore, that his efforts were generally well known.
Ovetari Chapel
In 1448 Mantegna, Giovanni d'Alemagna, Antonio Vivarini, and Niccolo Pizzolo were commissioned to fresco the Ovetari Chapel in the Church of the Eremitani, Padua, with the stories of St. James and St. Christopher. The initial contract divided the work more or less equally among the four artists, but, owing to subsequent disputes and the deaths of Giovanni d'Alemagna and Pizzolo, Mantegna painted the greater part of the frescoes. An appraisal of the work was carried out in 1454, which confirmed that the other three artists had only partially finished their assignments. Mantegna completed the project in 1455. There are numerous references to his difficult personality. It seems that he was a proud and abrasive person who did not get along well with others.
The Ovetari Chapel frescoes, Mantegna's early masterpiece, were almost totally destroyed during World War II. They showed Mantegna's concern for establishing rather crisp, sculpturesque forms in an accurately rendered perspective space which carefully took into account the beholder's viewpoint. Also, details of costume, armor, and architecture demonstrated that Mantegna had an archeological interest in classical antiquity.
In 1453 Mantegna married Niccolosa Bellini, the daughter of the Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini. The marriage brought Mantegna into an important artistic family.
Mantegna painted a number of important works during his Paduan period (1448-1460), including the St. Luke Altarpiece (Milan), St. Sebastian (Vienna), Agony in the Garden (London), the portraits of Cardinal Mezzarota (Berlin) and Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga (Naples), and the altarpiece for the church of S. Zeno in Verona. The S. Zeno Altarpiece was inspired by Donatello's high altar for the church of S. Antonio in Padua and combined real and painted elements in a unified way that anticipated Mantegna's paintings in the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua.
Camera degli Sposi
In 1459 Mantegna was appointed court painter to Ludovico Gonzaga in Mantua, and the following year the artist moved there from Padua. The Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal Palace was completed in 1474. It is not known for certain when Mantegna began the project. In 1466-1467 he visited Florence and Pisa. Stylistic aspects of the frescoes suggest that Mantegna did not begin them until he returned from Florence. It is known by a letter that the artist was working on the project in October 1471.
The Camera degli Sposi is a rectangular room with a moved barrel vault broken by three lunettes on each wall. Mantegna transformed the ceiling into a painted dome with an oculus in the center through which we catch a glimpse of a cloud-flecked sky and see the faces of people and cherubs looking down into the chamber. The walls are painted to resemble a landscape seen through openings in an airy pavilion. On one wall is the return of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga; on another wall is a portrait of the Gonzaga family posed on a platform that seems to rest on the real mantle of the fireplace. In his decorations Mantegna unified the actual space of the room with the painted space of the frescoes to create an illusionism that foretells the work of Correggio.
Last Works
Mantegna's artistic output was of remarkably high quality. In 1484 he began the series of nine canvases of the Triumph of Caesar (Hampton Court) for Francesco II Gonzaga, which was not finished before 1492. Lorenzo the Magnificent, the ruler of Florence, called on Mantegna in his studio in Mantua in 1484. Between 1488 and 1490 Mantegna was in Rome working for Pope Innocent VIII. His Madonna della Vittoria (Paris) of 1496 commemorates the battle of Fornovo of the preceding year. Other important works of the 1490s include the Dead Christ (Milan) and St. Sebastian (Venice). In the 1500s he painted two canvases for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este: Parnassus and Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (both Paris).
A number of engravings are attributed to Mantegna. Whether he engraved the plates himself or - and this seems more plausible - made the designs which were then engraved by other craftsmen is not known. The so-called autograph engravings include the Entombment, Risen Christ between Saints Andrew and Longinus, Madonna and Child, Battle of the Sea Gods, Bacchanal with Silenus, and Bacchanal with a Vat. Mantegna died on Sept. 13, 1506, in Mantua.
Further Reading
A sound monograph on Mantegna is E. Tietze-Conrat, Mantegna: Paintings, Drawings and Engravings (1955). Paul Kristeller, Andrea Mantegna (1901), is still useful. See also Millard Meiss, Andrea Mantegna as Illuminator (1957).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Andrea Mantegna |
Bibliography
See Complete Paintings of Mantegna, ed. by L. Coletti (1970); L. Berti, Mangegna (1964).
| Wikipedia: Andrea Mantegna |
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This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (August 2009) |
| Andrea Mantegna | |
 St. Sebastian, 1456-59; panel; Musée du Louvre |
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| Birth name | Andrea Mantegna |
| Born | c. 1431 Isola di Carturo, Italy |
| Died | September 13, 1506 Mantua, Italy |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Field | Painting, Fresco |
| Training | Francesco Squarcione |
| Movement | Italian Renaissance |
| Works | St. Sebastian Camera degli Sposi The Agony in the Garden |
Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was a North Italian Renaissance painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.
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Mantegna was born in Isola di Carturo, close to Padua in the Republic of Venice, second son of a carpenter, Biagio. At the age of eleven he became the apprentice of Francesco Squarcione, Paduan painter. Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a faculty for acting. Like his famous compatriot Petrarca, Squarcione was something of a fanatic for ancient Rome: he travelled in Italy, and perhaps Greece, amassing antique statues, reliefs, vases, etc., forming a collection of such works, then making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others to study. All the while, he continued undertaking works on commission for which his pupils no less than himself were made available.
As many as 137 painters and pictorial students passed through Squarcine's school, which had been established towards 1440 and which became famous all over Italy. Padua was attractive for artists coming not only from Veneto but also from Tuscany, such as Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi and Donatello. Mantegna's early career was shaped indeed by impressions of Florentine works. At the time, Mantegna was said to be a favorite pupil; Squarcione taught him the Latin language, and instructed him to study fragments of Roman sculpture. The master also preferred forced perspective, the lingering results of which may account for some Mantegna's later innovations. However, at the age of seventeen, Mantegna separated himself from Squarcione. He later claimed that Squarcione had profited from his work without paying the rights.
His first work, now lost, was an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia in 1448. The same year Mantegna was called, together with Nicolò Pizolo, to work with a large group of painters entrusted with the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the apse of the church of Eremitani. It is probable, however, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione, including Mantegna, had already begun the series of frescoes in the chapel of S. Cristoforo, in the church of Sant'Agostino degli Eremitani, today considered his masterpiece. After a series of coincidences, Mantegna finished most of the work alone, though Ansuino, who collaborated with Mantegna in the Ovetari Chapel, brought his style in the Forlì school of painting. The now censorious Squarcione carped about the earlier works of this series, illustrating the life of St James; he said the figures were like men of stone, and had better have been colored stone-color at once.
This series was almost entirely lost in the 1944 allied bombings of Padua. The most dramatic work of the fresco cycle was the work set in the worm's-eye view perspective, St. James Led to His Execution. (For an example of Mantegna's use of a lowered view point, see the image at right of Saints Peter and Paul; though much less dramatic in its perspective that the St. James picture, the San Zeno altarpiece was done shortly after the St. James cycle was finished, and uses many of the same techniques, including the classicizing architectural structure.)
The sketch of the St. Stephen fresco survived and is the earliest known preliminary sketch which still exists to compare to the corresponding fresco. Despite the authentic look of the monument, it is not a copy of any known Roman structure. Mantegna also adopted the wet drapery patterns of the Romans, who derived the form from the Greek invention, for the clothing of his figures, although the tense figures and interactions are derived from Donatello. The drawing shows proof that nude figures were used in the conception of works during the Early Renaissance. In the preliminary sketch, the perspective is less developed and closer to a more average viewpoint however.
Among the other early Mantegna frescoes are the two saints over the entrance porch of the church of Sant'Antonio in Padua, 1452, and an altarpiece of St. Luke and other saints (at left) for the church of S. Giustina, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan (1453). As the young artist progressed in his work, he came under the influence of Jacopo Bellini, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni and Gentile, and of a daughter Nicolosia. In 1453 Jacopo consented to a marriage between Nicolosia to Mantegna in marriage.
Andrea seems to have been influenced by his old preceptor's strictures; though his later subjects, for example, those from the legend of St. Christopher, combine his sculptural style with a greater sense of naturalism and vivacity. Trained as he had been in the study of marbles and the severity of the antique, Mantegna openly avowed that he considered ancient art superior to nature as being more eclectic in form. As a result, the painter affected precision of outline, privileging the figure. Overall, Mantegna's work thus tended towards rigidity, demonstrating an austere wholeness rather than graceful sensitivity of expression. His draperies are tight and closely folded, being studied (it is said) from models draped in paper and woven fabrics gummed in place. His figures are slim, muscular and bony; the action impetuous but of arrested energy. Finally, tawny landscape, gritty with littering pebbles, marks the athletic hauteur of his style.
Mantegna never changed the manner which he had adopted in Padua, though his coloring—at first neutral and undecided—strengthened and matured. Throughout his works there is more balancing of color than fineness of tone. One of his great aims was optical illusion, carried out by a mastery of perspective which, though not always mathematically correct, attained an astonishing effect in those times.
Successful and admired though he was there, Mantegna left his native Padua at an early age, and never resettled there again; the hostility of Squarcione has been assigned as the cause. He spent the rest of his life in Verona, Mantua and Rome; it has not been confirmed that he also stayed in Venice and Florence. In Verona around 1459, he painted, a grand altarpiece for the church of San Zeno Maggiore, a Madonna and angels, with four saints on each side (at right; detail above).
The Marquis Ludovico II Gonzaga of Mantua had for some time been pressing Mantegna to enter his service; and the following year, 1460 Mantegna was appointed court artist. He resided at first from time to time at Goito, but, from December 1466 onwards, he moved with his family to Mantua. His engagement was for a salary of 75 lire a month, a sum so large for that period as to mark conspicuously the high regard in which his art was held. He was in fact the first painter of any eminence ever domiciled in Mantua.
His Mantuan masterpiece was painted in the apartment of the Castle of the city, today known as Camera degli Sposi (literally, "Wedding Chamber"): a series of full compositions in fresco including various portraits of the Gonzaga family and some figures of genii.
The Chamber's decoration was finished presumably in 1474. The ten years that followed were not happy ones for Mantegna and Mantua: his character grew irritable, his son Bernardino died, as well as the marquis Ludovico, his wife Barbara and his successor Federico (who had declared Mantegna cavaliere, "knight" ). Only with the election of Francesco II of Gonzaga did the artistic commissions in Mantua begin again. He built a stately house in the area of the church of San Sebastiano, and adorned it with a multitude of paintings. The house can be still seen today, although the pictures have perished. In this period he began to collect some ancient Roman busts (which were donated to Lorenzo de Medici when the Florentine leader visited Mantua in 1483), painted some architectonic and decorative fragments, and finished the intense St. Sebastian now in the Louvre (box at top).
In 1488 Mantegna was called by Pope Innocent VIII to paint frescos in a chapel Belvedere in the Vatican. This series of frescos, including a noted Baptism of Christ, was destroyed by Pius VI in 1780. The pope treated Mantegna with less liberality than he had been used to at the Mantuan court; but all things considered their connection, which ceased in 1500, was not unsatisfactory to either party. Mantegna also met the famous Turkish hostage Jem and studied with attention the ancient monuments, but his impression of the city was a disappointing one as a whole. Returned to Mantua in 1490, he embraced again his more literary and bitter vision of antiquity, and entered in strong connection with the new marquise, the cultured and intelligent Isabella d'Este.
In what was now his city he went on with the nine tempera pictures of the Triumphs of Caesar, which he had probably begun before his leaving for Rome, and which he finished around 1492. These superbly invented and designed compositions are gorgeous with the splendour of their subject-matter, and with the classical learning and enthusiasm of one of the master-spirits of the age. Considered Mantegna's finest work, they were sold in 1628 along with the bulk of the Mantuan art treasures to King Charles I of England. They are now in Hampton Court Palace, somewhat faded, but many repaintings have been removed in a recent restoration. His workshop produced a series of engravings after them, which largely account for their rapid fame throughout Europe.
In spite of declining health, Mantegna continued to be active. Other works of this period include the Madonna of the Caves, the St. Sebastian and the famous Lamentation over the Dead Christ, probably painted for his personal funerary chapel. Another work of Mantegna's later years was the so-called Madonna della Vittoria, now in the Louvre. It was painted in tempera about 1495, in commemoration of the Battle of Fornovo, whose disputable outcome Francesco Gonzaga was eager to show as an Italian League victory; the church which originally housed the picture was built from Mantegna's own design. The Madonna is here depicted with various saints, the archangel Michael and St. Maurice holding her mantle, which is extended over the kneeling Francesco Gonzaga, amid a profusion of rich festooning and other accessory. Though not in all respects of his highest order of execution, this counts among the most obviously beautiful and attractive of Mantegna's works from which the qualities of beauty and attraction are often excluded, in the stringent pursuit of those other excellences more germane to his severe genius, tense energy passing into haggard passion.
After 1497 Mantegna was commissioned by Isabella d'Este to translate the mythological themes written by the court poet Paride Ceresara into paintings for her private apartment (studiolo) in the Palazzo Ducale. These paintings were dispersed in the following years: one of them, the legend of the God Comus, was left unfinished by Mantegna and completed by his successor as court painter in Mantua, Lorenzo Costa.
After the death of his wife, Mantegna became at an advanced age the father of a natural son, Giovanni Andrea; and at the last, although he continued launching out into various expenses and schemes, he had serious tribulations, such as the banishment from Mantua of his son Francesco, who had incurred the marquis' displeasure. Perhaps the aged master and connoisseur regarded as barely less trying the hard necessity of parting with a beloved antique bust of Faustina.
Very soon after this transaction he died in Mantua, on September 13, 1506. In 1516, a handsome monument was set up to him by his sons in the church of Sant'Andrea, where he had painted the altar-piece of the mortuary chapel. The dome is decorated by Correggio.
Mantegna was no less eminent as an engraver, though his history in that respect is somewhat obscure, partly because he never signed or dated any of his plates, but for a single disputed instance of 1472. The account which has come down to us from Vasari (as usual keen to assert that everything flows from Florence) is that Mantegna began engraving in Rome, prompted by the engravings produced by the Florentine Baccio Baldini after Sandro Botticelli. This is now considered most unlikely as it would consign all the numerous and elaborate engravings made by Mantegna to the last sixteen or seventeen years of his life, which seems a scanty space for them, and besides the earlier engravings indicate an earlier period of his artistic style. He may have begun engraving while still in Padua, under the tuition of a distinguished goldsmith, Niccolò. He and his workshop engraved about thirty plates, according to the usual reckoning; large, full of figures, and highly studied. It is now considered either that he only engraved seven himself, or none. Another artist from the workshop who made several plates is usually identified as Zoan Andrea.
Among the principal examples are: Battle of the Sea Monsters,Virgin and Child, a Bacchanal Festival, Hercules and Antaeus, Marine Gods, Judith with the Head of Holophernes, the Deposition from the Cross, the Entombment, the Resurrection, the Man of Sorrows, the Virgin in a Grotto, and several scenes from the Triumph of Julius Caesar after his paintings. Several of his engravings are supposed to be executed on some metal less hard than copper. The technique of himself and his followers is characterized by the strongly marked forms of the design, and by the oblique formal hatchings of the shadows. The prints are frequently to be found in two states, or editions. In the first state the prints have been taken off with the roller, or even by handpressing, and they are weak in tint; in the second state the printing press has been used, and the ink is stronger.
Neither Mantegna or his workshop are now believed to have produced the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi cards.
Giorgio Vasari eulogizes Mantegna, although pointing out his litigious character. He had been fond of his fellow-pupils at Padua: and for two of them, Dario da Trevigi and Marco Zoppo, he retained a steady friendship. Mantegna became very expensive in his habits, fell at times into difficulties, and had to urge his valid claims upon the marquis' attention.
In solid antique taste, Mantegna distanced all contemporary competition. Though substantially related to the 15th century, the influence of Mantegna on the style and tendency of his age was very marked over Italian art generally. Giovanni Bellini, in his earlier works, obviously followed the lead of his brother-in-law Andrea. Albrecht Dürer was influenced by his style during his two trips in Italy. Leonardo da Vinci took from Mantegna the use of decorations with festoons and fruit.
Mantegna's main legacy in considered the introduction of spatial illusionism, both in frescoes and in sacra conversazione paintings: his tradition of ceiling decoration was followed for almost three centuries. Starting from the faint cupola of the Camera degli Sposi, Correggio brought on his master and collaborator's research in perspective constructions, producing eventually a masterwork like the dome of Cathedral of Parma.
"Andrea Mantegna". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Andrea_Mantegna. |
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