MANTEGNA, ANDREA. - Born presumably at Isola di Carturo, in the Vicenza area, in 1431, d. at Mantua on 13 Sept. 1506. After having spent six years in Squarcione's workshop, adopted as a son, he broke away from it in 1448 and entered the company of young men headed by Niccolò Pizzolo, which took on the work of half of the Ovetari chapel at the Eremitani in Padua, while the other half was assigned to the elders Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d'Alemagna. When the latter died in 1450 and Vivarini withdrew, the whole work passed to the other group and, through the various vicissitudes of this turbulent enterprise, ended up falling, for the greater part, to M., as appears from a series of documents. To Pizzolo, from whom M. parted as early as 1449 and who died in 1453, belong, besides the terracotta altarpiece, the figure on the outside in the conch of the apse and a few minor things; to Ansuino da Forlì and Bono da Ferrara belong the first four Stories of St. Christopher.
M., besides figures of Saints in the conch, and the Ascension behind the altar, painted the left wall, destroyed by an aerial bombardment in 1944, with Stories of St. James, beginning in 1449 and probably finishing around 1454-55. The prodigious young man, through a process of enrichment and clarification of his language, which can be followed in the unfolding of the work, from a certain compositional elementariness of the first two stories (lunette) up to the fullness and rigor of the last (lower register) with the Going to Execution and the Martyrdom, achieves in this the highest poetic intensity and wins the absolute coherence and perfect perspicuity of his stylistic laws.
A world charged with a powerful vital energy is bound in a frigid fixity of masks, of gestures, of movements. A spectacle that we seem to have under our fingers, offered to our grasp by its overmastering tangibility, and at the same time unreachable and irremediably closed because of the intransigent unreality of its structure. In this synthesis of extremes, of opposites, which subjugates the most discordant motifs to a single expression, lies the supreme poetic reason, the heroic and terrible tone of this art, at times oppressive as a nightmare. Line serves M., painter-sculptor, only to root things irrevocably in their place, with the firm vigor of its contour, and to reaffirm their solitude.
But such intransigent absoluteness of style seems to soften, or rather to be enriched with new interests, in the last two Stories of St. Christopher painted by M. some time later, to complete the facing wall. This is the time of his closest approach to the Bellini; to this moment, which entailed a brief stay in Venice, belongs also the great polyptych of St. Luke for the Paduan church of St. Justina, now at Brera, in many respects comparable to the Bellinian polyptychs of the Carità, as well as to the altarpiece of St. Euphemia. A Venetian activity of M., to which must also be referred the cartoon for the mosaic of the Dormitio Virginis in the Mascoli chapel in St. Mark's, is the frieze of the Cornaro tomb at the Frari, rightly assigned to him by Fiocco.
Having returned to Padua, M. completed, between 1457 and 1459, the St. Zeno altarpiece in Verona, which happily unified the three parts in the architectural invention of the quadriporticus, within which the figures of the Virgin and the Saints are placed, and whose front side coincides with the frame.
In this imposing creation there returns the marble solemnity of the Paduan works, but it might be said to be motivated by a warmer feeling of humanity, which inspires a marvelous series of Madonnas caressing the Child, in which infant grace is captured, in great variety and originality of attitudes, with an indescribable penetration and gentleness. Whereas the famous Dead Christ of Brera seems almost a sublime, but somewhat aridly abstract, acrobatic feat on the most arduous problems of perspective and anatomy; and its prodigious foreshortening became a textbook for the succeeding generations of painters.
In Aug. 1460 M., after endless urgings by the Marquis of Mantua, moved to that city, where he now definitively bound his activity as a painter, but also probably as a sculptor and architect, to that court. A journey to Tuscany in 1467, for a consultation on the works of the Pisan Camposanto, must have offered new, fresher and broader breath to his inspiration, which is realized in the great masterpiece of his maturity, the frescoes of the Camera degli Sposi, signed with legitimate pride and dated 1474. M.'s heroic spirit succeeds in raising to an almost epic tone, in the grave dignity of the faces, in the monumental composition, in the vastness of the horizons, these fundamentally modest themes of family life. In the other masterpiece of the painter's later years, after a journey to Rome in 1488, the series of Triumphs, now largely at Hampton Court, a pride of sudden movements, together with a renewed and very lively interest in antiquarian studies, seems to reveal almost a partial return to positions of an earlier style. Compositions powerful in the plasticity of the individual figures, but perhaps a little confused and oratorical in rhythm, at times overwhelmed by an all too transparent exactness in the minute descriptions. And thus somewhat cooled by the preoccupation with allegorical conceptualism are the last mythological canvases, finished by Costa for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este. M. was also a great engraver. - See pl. CXXVIII.
Bibliography3 works
Luigi Celetti