Andrea Mantegna and the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Manca

      In medieval times, a new episode was added to early Christian legends of Christopher, relating how when his execution was ordered by the King of Lycia, forty archers were called on to kill the giant. Yet the arrows did not harm Christopher, and one of the arrows turned around in mid-air and landed instead in the eye of the king, who cries out as the arrow strikes and blinds him in Mantegna’s rendering. In a characteristic spatial device, the painter sets Christopher outside the architectural moulding, putting him into the space of the viewer. The next part of the scene unfolds on the right side of this work; although spatially connected to the left side, it represents a later moment in time, when Christopher is finally beheaded (since the arrows failed), and his body is being dragged through the streets. The saint is depicted in bold foreshortening on the ground and his head, lying close by before the spectator, has a shock effect like that of the beheading of Saint James directly across the chapel. Early sources tell us many of the figures in the crowd on the right are portraits of Mantegna’s contemporaries, most of them Paduan noblemen, doctors, and humanists, who formed an important component of the artist’s appreciative public.

      In his work for the Ovetari Chapel, Mantegna achieved an incredible feat, and one can argue the torch passed to him as the leading painter in Italy. In a perhaps unexpected turn of events, the young Paduan painter came closer than any other Italian painter to fulfilling the goals of the period as set out by a chief theoretician, Leon Battista Alberti who stressed, in his widely read and admired treatise On Painting of 1435, art should show figures who are alive down to their very fingernails, and painting should tell stories vividly and with an economy of means, representing in a memorable and accurate way human gestures, emotions, and attitudes. In accordance with the humanist’s advice, Mantegna’s art improves Nature, not just imitates it; the painter set out to better and ennoble the real world. Alberti, and many others, also recommended painters and sculptors borrow freely from Greek and Roman models. Because in the Renaissance no ancient paintings were yet known (this was before the excavation of such sites as Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century), Mantegna had to borrow from the world of Roman sculpture and architecture, and he recreated his own inventive world of antiquity. In short, in these earliest works Mantegna changed the course of Italian art, and he fulfilled more completely than any other artist the aspirations the progressive Early Renaissance opinion about what it is that constitutes good, lively painting.

      This is not to say Mantegna faced no criticism in these early years. Certainly some of the late Gothic painters and their loyal public must have thought his work to be harsh, overly realistic, and lacking the suave gracefulness of the traditional style they practised. Even Mantegna’s teacher, Francesco Squarcione, is recorded (by the biographer Giorgio Vasari) to have carped at Mantegna’s murals in the Ovetari Chapel. He said Mantegna’s figures looked as though they are sculptures rather than real people, saying of the frescoes in the chapel, “They were inferior work since when he did them Andrea had imitated marble statues. Stone”, said Squarcione, “was essentially a hard substance and it could never convey the softness and tenderness of flesh and natural objects, with the various movements and folds.”[3] This remark must have stung Mantegna (and puzzled him, since Squarcione had young Andrea learn by copying plaster casts), and it is possible the more supple figures and the slight softening of forms and colours occurring in the later Saint James scenes and in the Execution of Saint Christopher were a result of his adjustment to such criticism. And the young artist and his former master exchanged more than words at this time: in 1456, Mantegna sued Squarcione (and won) to break the legal partnership they had established in 1448 when he was still a minor.

      24. St Sebastian, c. 1455–1460. Tempera on panel, 68 × 30 cm. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna.

      25. The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1450–1455. Tempera on canvas (transferred from panel), 40 × 55.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

      26. St Euphemia, 1454. Tempera on canvas, 171 × 78 cm. Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples.

      In addition to all his interactions with Squarcione and other artists during the years of the Ovetari Chapel, Mantegna also entered at this time into a long relationship with the great family of artists from Venice, the Bellini. It is even possible this new association helped to sour his relations with Squarcione, who might have resented his adopted son’s new artistic relations. At any rate, Mantegna came into close contact with the work of the Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini, for in 1453 Mantegna married Bellini’s daughter, Nicolosia. Jacopo Bellini’s art contained much Mantegna must have admired. Bellini made many drawings of daring perspective views, and he was fascinated with fragments of antique sculpture and architecture, as we can see in one of his drawings.

      Jacopo’s painting style was subtle and showed great perception of the effects of light; perhaps his skill as a painter served as a model for Mantegna in his development. Jacopo’s sons Gentile Bellini and Giovanni Bellini would become leading painters in Venice, and there would continue to be a mutual exchange of ideas between these brothers-in-law, all contemporaries and leaders in their field. One fruit of his association with the Bellini family is Mantegna’s early Agony in the Garden, which recalls a similar work by Giovanni Bellini, both being based ultimately on a composition of the elder, Jacopo Bellini (Figs. 21 and 22). One of the last commissions Mantegna would undertake remained unfinished at his death, and the project was completed in part by his brother-in-law Giovanni more than fifty years after the time of the Ovetari Chapel (see Fig. 93). It is likely Giovanni Bellini learned a great deal from Mantegna in the early years of their contact, but later Giovanni’s style moved in another, independent direction, becoming far softer than Andrea’s and more harmonious in light and colouring. This can already be seen in the compositions on the same theme, hung nearby in the National Gallery in London. Giovanni’s Agony in the Garden (Fig. 22), showing Christ and the sleeping Apostles approached by Judas and the Roman soldiers who will arrest Christ. Bellini’s picture is luminous and soft in texture, with a pictorial unity created by the light and colour. In his version, Mantegna has created a stony sharp world, with bare branches against the sky, strongly foreshortened Apostles, and angels riding on a firm bank of clouds, the work dominated by pebbles, erupting masses of mountain, and striated rock in the middleground (Fig. 21). Not only do these paintings indicate the difference between the Venetian style of the Renaissance and Mantegna’s stony approach; they are incipient examples of the divide between the linear and the painterly approaches to art-making, a contrast that would for centuries come to characterise two major schools of painting in Europe.

      The fame that ensued from the work on the Ovetari Chapel frescoes would eventually bring Mantegna an opportunity to become a well-paid court painter in the city-state of Mantua. Before moving there in 1459, he completed several other notable works on religious themes. One of these is his Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 25), which he perhaps made for Borso d’Este, ruler of the city-state of Ferrara, located a hundred kilometres south-west of Padua (see Fig. 5). With this work we finally have a chance to assess

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