ANDREA MANTEGNA. - Born probably in Isola di Carturo, near Vicenza, in 1431; died in Mantua on 13 September 1506. After spending six years in the workshop of Squarcione, who adopted him as a son, he left in 1448 and joined the group of young artists led by Niccolò Pizzolo, who was assigned half the work on the Ovetari Chapel in the Eremitani Church in Padua, while the other half was entrusted to the older artists Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni D'Alfano. After the latter’s death in 1450 and Vivarini’s retirement, the entire commission passed to the younger group, and through the various vicissitudes of this turbulent enterprise, Mantegna ultimately took charge of the larger portion, as documented in a series of records. To Pizzolo, from whom Mantegna had already separated in 1449 and who died in 1453, belong, besides the terracotta altarpiece, the figure on the exterior of the apse’s semi-dome and a few minor works; Ansuino da Forlì and Bono da Ferrara painted the first four Stories of St Christopher.
Mantegna, in addition to figures of saints in the semi-dome and the Ascension behind the altar, painted the left wall—destroyed by an aerial bombardment in 1944—with the Stories of St James, begun in 1449 and probably completed around 1454–55. The prodigious young artist, through a process of enrichment and clarification in his language that can be traced in the development of the work, from a certain elementary composition in the first two scenes (lunette) to the fullness and rigor of the final ones (lower register) with The Way to Execution and The Martyrdom, achieves in this the highest poetic intensity and secures the absolute coherence and perfect clarity of his stylistic laws.
A world charged with powerful vital energy is bound in a glacial fixity of masks, gestures, and movements. A spectacle that seems within our grasp, offered to our touch by its overpowering tangibility, yet at the same time unattainable and irrevocably closed by the unyielding unreality of its structure. In this synthesis of extremes, of opposites, which reconciles the most discordant motifs into a single expression, lies the supreme poetic reason, the heroic and terrible tone of this art, at times oppressive as a nightmare. The line, serving Mantegna the painter-sculptor, is used only to anchor, with the firm vigor of its contour, things irrevocably in their place and to underscore their solitude.
Yet this uncompromising stylistic absolutism seems to soften, or rather to be enriched by new interests, in the last two Stories of St Christopher, which Mantegna painted somewhat later to complete the opposite wall. This is the period of his closest approach to the Bellini; to this moment, which involved a brief stay in Venice, also belongs the great altarpiece of St Luke for the Paduan church of S. Giustina, now in the Brera, comparable in many respects to the Bellinesque altarpieces of the Carità and to the altarpiece of S. Eufemia. To Mantegna’s Venetian activity, to which should also be attributed the cartoon for the museum of the Dormitio Virginis in the Mascoli Chapel in S. Marco and the rough draft of the Cornaro tomb in the Frari, justly assigned to him by Fiocco.
Returning to Padua, between 1457 and 1459 Mantegna executed the triptych of S. Zeno in Verona, which successfully unified the three parts through the architectural invention of the quadriportico, within which are placed the figures of the Virgin and the Saints, and whose front side coincides with the frame.
In this imposing creation returns the marble-like solemnity of the Paduan works, but now seemingly motivated by a warmer feeling of humanity, which inspires a remarkable series of Madonnas fondling the Child, in which childlike grace is captured with great variety and originality of pose, with a penetration and gentleness beyond words. Meanwhile, the famous Dead Christ in the Brera appears almost a sublime, yet somewhat aridly abstract, acrobatic feat on the most difficult problems of perspective and anatomy; and its prodigious foreshortening became a model for subsequent generations of painters.
In August 1460, after endless entreaties from the Marquis of Mantua, Mantegna moved to that city, where he definitively linked his activity as a painter—and probably also as a sculptor and architect—to that court. A journey to Tuscany in 1467, for a consultation on the works of the Camposanto in Pisa, must have offered new, fresher, and broader inspiration that found expression in the great masterpiece of his maturity, the frescoes of the Camera degli Sposi, signed with legitimate pride and dated 1474. The heroic spirit of Mantegna elevates to an almost epic tone, in the grave dignity of the figures, the monumental composition, and the vast horizons, themes that are in themselves modest—scenes of domestic life. In the other masterpiece from the painter’s later years, after a visit to Rome in 1488, the series of Triumphs at Hampton Court, a refinement of sudden movements, together with a renewed and vivid interest in antiquarian science, seems to reveal almost a partial return to earlier stylistic positions. Powerful compositions in the plasticity of individual figures, but perhaps somewhat confused and rhetorical in rhythm, at times overwhelmed by an overly transparent precision in minute details. And so, somewhat cooled by the concern for allegorical conceptualism, are the last mythological canvases, completed by Costa for the studiolo of Isabella d’Este. Mantegna was also a great engraver. – See pl. CXXVIII.