Andrea Mantegna and the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Manca
a mixture of egg and ground pigment that allows more minute and searching pictorial effects than the fresco technique he used in the Ovetari Chapel. Here Mantegna paints in incredible detail seemingly every stone, leaf, and sheep in the landscape. Mantegna’s skill at representing Nature is apparent in the atmospheric clouds, which are beautifully struck by the light, reflecting his close observation of the natural world. This painting also reveals on a small scale Mantegna’s emotional intensity, the picture including fervent shepherds and a loving, maternal Virgin. The Adoration of the Shepherds was widely admired and copied in Mantegna’s lifetime, a remarkable homage to so young an artist, still in his early twenties. Surely one of the new and attractive elements of this painting for Italian contemporaries of Mantegna was the coarse realism of the two shepherds, who approach the foreshortened Child and begin to genuflect. In earlier traditions of Italian painting it was customary to make all the figures look ideal, whether heroic or merely pretty, but Mantegna gives these men – with their brutal faces, torn clothing, and bare feet – a rustic crudity that was new in Italian art. This is a good early example of the kind of biting realism that would continue to be a hallmark of Mantegna’s artistry.
Humanistic themes never remained far off for Mantegna at any stage of his career. His Saint Euphemia, now in Naples (Fig. 26) seems to represent a classical Roman statue in a niche, with the swag of fruit, in ancient fashion, depicted overhead, and the inscription delineated in an accurate all’antica manner. The lion plays with the arm of the saint, his action helping to alleviate the severity of the spare Doric setting and the stoic reticence of Euphemia. This humanism can also be seen in his early, and justifiably famous, Saint Sebastian (Fig. 24). Sebastian was a Roman army officer of the third century who secretly became a Christian. When word of this conversion was known, his superiors ordered Sebastian’s own troops to shoot him with arrows. Mantegna’s saint makes for difficult viewing, as he is pierced with numerous arrows, including ones in his forehead and neck. We do not know for whom Mantegna painted the Saint Sebastian, but it is a perfect picture for someone with antiquarian or scholarly interests, and we must assume a learned patron enjoyed the classical references in this painting. At Sebastian’s feet and behind him are fragments of Roman sculpture, the kind of marble pieces being eagerly collected at that time by growing ranks of connoisseurs of antique art. More than one ancient Greek and Roman writer noted Nature, like an artist, forms recognisable shapes in clouds, and Mantegna here shows a marvellous horse and rider in the cloud on the upper left, the kind of pictorial detail that would have delighted his erudite viewers. The saint is bound to the column of a classical triumphal arch, which includes a beautiful Victory in the spandrel. This triumphal arch serves a double purpose, to allow one to admire antiquity, but also to stress Christianity’s triumph over Roman paganism, as attested by the crumbling condition of the arch. Thus, Mantegna manages to honour the Christian religion of his patrons as well as satisfy their interest in the classical past. Mantegna was surely pleased with this work, and proud of his liaison with the world of learning in Padua, for he prominently signed his name in Greek just to the saint’s right; the inscription states this is “the work of Andrea M.” Mantegna could not have known much Greek, and there is nothing Greek about the subject or the setting; but the young painter took the opportunity anyway to show off a bit of his own fascination with the classical past. This is Mantegna’s form of classicism, however, not a timeless calm, but an aggressive, ruptured scene echoing the saint’s suffering. The painter turns the paving squares in jarring points towards the picture plane, and the saint stands on a stone fragment with its pointed corner turned outward at an even more destabilising off-angle. The fragments consist of shattered bits of masonry, heads, and feet, and the triumphal arch has its brick core laid bare. The saint prevails over a moral world in collapse.
27. San Zeno Altarpiece, c. 1457–1459. Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore, Verona.
28. The Crucifixion (from the San Zeno Altarpiece), c. 1457–1459. Tempera on panel, 66 × 90 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
29. Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection of Christ, c. 1463. Fresco. Palazzo Comunale, San Sepolcro.
Despite his attempt at sharp realism, Mantegna’s Sebastian is not rendered with complete anatomical accuracy. Although in the fifteenth century there was a growing interest in such subjects as the human body and medicine, it was not until later in the fifteenth century when artists such as Leonardo da Vinci would carry out dissections of the human figure in order to arrive at more scientific and convincing representations. Many of Mantegna’s supporters in learned circles might have praised his naturalism, just as so many ancient writers lauded the realism of their contemporary artists, but Renaissance humanists, being literary men, did not frequently spur on artists to dissect and scrutinise the human body. Instead, they emphasised the study of antique sculpture, and indeed the rib cage and abdominal musculature of Mantegna’s tormented saint recall the anatomical definition of the male body as often found in classical sculpture. But whatever its deviations from natural appearance, Mantegna’s saint probably seemed convincingly real to contemporary viewers who were accustomed to seeing rubbery, elegant Gothic figures. Here, as frequently happened in Mantegna’s work and in other Renaissance painting, the investigation of the real world was filtered through the vision and artistic conventions of classical antiquity.
When Mantegna received the offer to move to Mantua in 1457 he delayed the move more than two years because he had other commissions to fulfil, especially his impressive San Zeno altarpiece (Fig. 27). In the larger panel stand the Madonna and Saints, and in the predella below are representations of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (left), the Crucifixion (centre), and the Resurrection of Christ (right). Mantegna painted the altarpiece in 1457–1459 for the church of San Zeno in Verona, where it is still kept, although all the smaller panels have been taken away to museums and have been replaced in the original altarpiece by copies. The work was commissioned by Gregorio Correr, a wealthy Venetian who had held a position of authority over the church in Verona, which is not so far from Padua and which, like Padua, was part of the Venetian Republic. Correr had received a solid humanist education in Mantua, studying with the famous humanist teacher Vittorino da Feltre. Later he wrote a tragedy which, for centuries, was mistaken for an original Roman work of drama. Because of his own interests in antiquity, Correr was undoubtedly attracted to the classical revival aspects of Mantegna’s artistry.
This altarpiece is an exuberant exposition of Mantegna’s style and must have created a shock when it was unveiled to the public in Verona, where the demure, polite traditions of International Gothic painting were still alive and widely practised. Here Mantegna unleashed a profusion of colour, three-dimensional form, and archaeological detail, all rendered in a crisp linear fashion. Even the frame is not in the usual Gothic form, which would have called for intricate foliage, slender colonnettes, and pointed arches. Well into the fifteenth century, works by Renaissance artists were frequently paired with frames made by artists working in the late, decorative Gothic style. But here Mantegna designed his own frame, which was carried out by a sculptor working under his instructions. The four great Corinthian columns and the other classical details make this monumental frame different from anything the public in Verona would have known. Moreover, in a clever stroke, Mantegna painted the swags of fruit between the real columns of the frame and the painted pilasters behind, setting up an effective and witty spatial continuity between the frame and the depicted world.
The form of the main panel is called a “holy conversation” (sacra conversazione in Italian) in which saints, who lived in various historical times, are shown gathered in one place to honour the Virgin and Child. The saints include most prominently Saint Peter on the far left and Saint John the Baptist on the far right, as well as several other bishop saints and female martyrs. Most of his earlier paintings depicted saints in separate isolated panels, not grouped together in this way (see Fig. 6). Indeed, a few years earlier, Mantegna – perhaps at the urging of the patron – made an old-fashioned polyptych for the church of Santa Giustina in Padua in 1453–1454 (Fig. 31), with figures set isolated in niches and placed against gold backgrounds. But the San Zeno altarpiece is different in its spatial and figural unity. A few instances of the unified sacra conversazione had preceded