Home	Mantegna: The Life of Andrea Mantegna, Painter of Mantua [c.1431-1506]
	Mantegna was probably born about 1431, which makes him the contemporary of Antonio Pollaiuolo, and also of his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini, who may have been a year or so younger. He grew up in Padua, where Donatello's Santo Altar, and the classically inspired Gattamelata, were formative influences on him while he was still in his 'teens. His early interest in Antiquity was partly the outcome of his relationship to Francesco Squarcione (1397-1468), an archaeologist, and probably a dealer in antiquities, as well as a painter, who had travelled in Greece as well as in Italy. Only two works by Squarcione are known: a signed Madonna which is in Berlin and an altarpiece in Padua, finished in 1452. These are close to Mantegna in style, probably because both artists took as their starting-point a combination of Donatello and classical sculpture. Squarcione seems to have been a difficult character, and Mantegna himself was equally prickly. Certainly they quarrelled violently, and a lawsuit finally terminated the apprenticeship and also the adopted-son relationship between the two men. Mantegna was extremely precocious, since he is known to have been working on the important fresco cycle in the Ovetari Chapel in 1448, when he was only about seventeen--at the same time, that is, that Donatello was working on the Santo Altar. Padua was the great university city of the north of Italy, and deeply interested, in the second half of the fifteenth century, in the study of Latin and Greek literature, and in the life of the antique world. As a result of living in this atmosphere the natural austerity of Mantegna's taste was channelled into archaeology, and his response to the rational and Humanist ideas of Donatello was reinforced by an interest in the exact details of classical Antiquity of an intensity to which Donatello himself seldom aspired. In 1454 Mantegna married Giovanni Bellini's sister. The currents of influence worked both ways, and while his classicism and his illusionistic interests were introduced into Venice, in Bellini's hands they were much softened and humanized. His frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel in the Church of the Eremitani were almost entirely destroyed in 1944, but photographs of the complete cycle exist. Mantegna worked there during two different periods, at first on some of the vaulting frescoes and on the left wall, which contained, by him, four scenes from the life of St James taken from the Golden Legend, and later on the right wall, where only the lowest fresco of the Martyrdom of St Christopher is by him. The apse has an Assumption by him, and the commissioner's objections to it ended in a lawsuit, so that a great deal of knowledge about the artist and the progress of the work is derived from the evidence given in court. Only the St Christopher and the Assumption have survived. The four frescoes of the Life of St James are arranged in two tiers; the top two of St James baptizing Hermogenes when on the way to Martyrdom and St James before the Judge form a pair balanced about a central void. The perspective is based at the eye-level of a spectator imagined to be immediately in front of the frescoes (that is, suspended in mid-air before them); the lower pair have the line of sight at the foot of the fresco, so that St James on the way to Execution and the Martyrdom of St James are seen in much sharper recession. There are also virtuoso tricks played with the spectator's relation to the world within the fresco, since in the Martyrdom one of the soldiers leans over the wooden railing which apparently delimits the most forward plane of the picture space, and thus impinges upon the spectators' world. All the frescoes contain evidence of what was to become one of Mantegna's main obsessions: his passion for archaeological exactitude, for the armour and the triumphal arches are obviously correct down to the last detail. in fact, so accurate was he as a recorder of classical remains that one of the inscriptions recorded in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum is included in it solely on his evidence. The hardness of his forms derives very largely from Donatello, but he was certainly conditioned to this type of vision by Squarcione, who is also the source of the garlands, often with putti disporting themselves among them, not only in Mantegna, but in many other Paduans. His colour veers unexpectedly between the extraordinarily intense and an almost monochromatic subtlety, his handling of detail is almost painfully precise, as in the lines and creases of his facial expressions, or in the clinging and convoluted folds of his draperies. The influence of Donatello is not only formal; the reliefs of the Santo Altar also governed Mantegna's creation of consistent pictorial space and his use of rather sharply inclined foreshortening to create dramatic effects. These stylistic features appear slightly modified in the Martyrdom of St Christopher on the opposite wall, which was probably completed by 1457. In it, the two sections of the narrative are united by a common architectural framework. Despite the terribly damaged state of the fresco it is still possible to see that the handling has become a little more mellow. Between 1456 and 1459 Mantegna painted the large altarpiece for the Church of S. Zeno in Verona, which is one of the decisive breaks with the older type of polyptych, and continues the development begun in Florence of the Sacra Conversazione in a unified pala. Mantegna's link with this development is patently through Donatello, and the source of the inspiration was the high altar of the Santo, which used in bronze the painted form of the Sacra Conversazione that was just being evolved in Florence when Donatello left for Padua in 1443. The Madonna sits dreamily upon a high throne, clustered about with musician child-angels, and in the panels on either side stand her attendant saints, reading or talking among themselves. A common architectural framework unites the three panels in the form of an open loggia through which a rosehedge and the sky appear. The three panels are both divided and united by the frame, which completes the loggia by becoming virtually its foremost member, each of the pilasters of the frame being echoed by a painted one within the picture space, and from the front architrave hang garlands of leaves and fruit, stretching across from one panel to the next. The multiplicity of minute detail in the sculptured frieze and the roundels on the piers, the draperies, the elaborate throne, recall the concern with all-over finish that becomes so strong a feature of Florentine painting. He is not interested in light, beyond creating an even illumination with just sufficient direction to it to make the picture space and the position of the figures within it logical and immediately clear. His tendency to make his flesh tones so cool and his forms so harshly detailed that they appear to be of stone or metal can be seen in the Louvre Crucifixion, which once was one of its predella panels, and in the St Sebastian in Vienna which Vasari actually described as being 'in his stony manner'. This offers a curiously moving combination of rather arid archaeology and Christian pathos, in the contrast between the suffering martyr and the ruined classical triumphal arch; similar ideas pervade the other, huge St Sebastian in the Louvre, and the very slightly smaller one in Venice which, much simpler, omits the classical overtones and concentrates on the pathos of suffering, with the motto Nihil stabile est nisi divinus. In 1460 Mantegna settled in Mantua, as Court Painter to the Gonzaga, and in the palace there he painted the Camera degli Sposi, a cycle which was completed in 1474, and, according to the inscription, seems to have been as much for his own as for their glorification. It is the first completely consistent illusionistic decoration of the Renaissance, since two walls are covered with frescoes representing events connected with the Gonzaga family, painted in such a way that the fireplace and the other architectural elements of the room are incorporated in the composition. The scene with the family surrounding the ruler and his wife, which is painted over the fireplace, appears to have the figures actually standing and seated upon the mantelpiece, which is thus converted into a dais, and the leather curtains which were part of the original hangings of the room are echoed in the painted curtains that close off some of the scenes. The ceiling is the most surprising part of all, for it apparently opens to the sky beyond a balustrade over which figures lean and peer down into the room, and the final touch of illusion is given by three small putti perched on the wrong side of the balustrade, and by a tub of plants, balanced on a bar and projecting into the void, immediately above the spectator's head. This the first foray into complete illusion in interior decoration; it lay fallow for nearly a half-century, possibly because it was in the private part of the palace, and it was not until the sixteenth century that perspective illusionism of this di sotto in sù type became one of the elements of the decorator's art. One of the other frescoes has a very fine landscape background, behind the figures of the Marquis greeting his son Francesco, arriving from Rome as a newly created Cardinal. The hardness of the forms is here slightly softened, and the extreme use of pure frontal and profile poses recalls something of Piero's treatment of groups. Also painted for the Gonzaga Court, between about 1486 and 1494, were the Triumphs of Caesar, which are probably Mantegna's most complete characterization of the antique world. They are less illusionistic and their purpose is now obscure, except that it is known that they served, on one occasion, as scenery for a Latin play. They have always been one of the greatest treasures of the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, but have unfortunately suffered much from injudicious restoration. By this time Mantegna was Court Painter, not to the potentate for whom he had come to Mantua to work, but to his grandson, and it is this Francesco who kneels before the throne in the Madonna of Victory painted to celebrate the inconclusive battle of Fornovo in 1495, in which Francesco claimed to have defeated the invading French. Again, this picture shows Mantegna's effective use of foreshortening for dramatic effect, and represents another stage in the history of the Sacra Conversazione, since it uses the curious device of the human figure on a smaller scale than the sacred ones, and also reflects the Bellinesque as well as the Ferrarese forms which had developed partly from his own earlier contribution to the theme. By far and away the most powerful of all his perspective effects is the famous Cristo Scorto, which represents the dead Christ in extreme foreshortening. This strange picture was found in his studio after his death in 1506, together with the 'Nihil stabile est . . .' St Sebastian; the two pictures may well explain why, in his later years, he had something of a reputation as a recluse, and also give the lie to the facile judgment that an extreme interest in, and love of, classical antiquity was incompatible with the most deeply sincere Christianity.