MANTEGNA, ANDREA. – Born presumably at Isola di Carturo, in the Vicenza area, in 1431; died at Mantua on 13 September 1506. After spending six years in Squarcione’s workshop, having been adopted as his son, he broke away from him in 1448 and joined the association of young artists led by Niccolò Pizzolo, which undertook half of the work on the Ovetari Chapel at the Eremitani in Padua, while the other half was assigned to the older Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni D'Alemagna. When the latter died in 1450 and Vivarini withdrew, all the work passed to the other group and, through the various vicissitudes of this eventful undertaking, ended up being assigned for the most part to M., as is shown by a series of documents. Pizzolo, from whom M. had already separated in 1449 and who died in 1453, was responsible, besides the terracotta altarpiece, for the figure on the exterior of the apse basin and a few minor works; Ansuino da Forlì and Bono da Ferrara painted the first four Stories of St. Christopher.
In addition to figures of Saints in the apse basin and the Ascension behind the altar, M. painted the left wall, destroyed by an air raid in 1944, with Stories of St. James, beginning in 1449 and probably finishing around 1454–55. The prodigious young artist, through a process of enrichment and clarification of his language that can be followed in the development of the work—from a certain compositional elementary quality in the first two stories (lunette) to the fullness and rigor of the last ones (lower register), with the Way to Execution and the Martyrdom—achieves here the highest poetic intensity and attains the absolute coherence and perfect perspicuity of his stylistic laws.
A world charged with powerful vital energy is held together in the icy fixity of masks, gestures, and movements. It is a spectacle that seems to lie beneath our fingers, offered to our grasp by its overbearing tangibility, and at the same time unreachable and irrevocably closed off by the uncompromising unreality of its structure. In this synthesis of extremes and opposites, which subjects the most discordant motifs to a single expression, lies the supreme poetic rationale, the heroic and terrible tone of this art, at times oppressive as a nightmare. Line, for M., the painter-sculptor, serves only to anchor things irrevocably in their places through the firm vigor of its contour, and to emphasize their solitude.
Yet this uncompromising absoluteness of style seems to be attenuated—or rather enriched with new interests—in the last two Stories of St. Christopher, painted by M. some time later to complete the opposite wall. This was the period of his closest association with the Bellini; this moment, which involved a brief residence in Venice, also produced the great altarpiece of S. Luca for the Paduan church of S. Giustina, now in Brera, comparable in many respects to the Bellinian altarpieces of the Carità, as well as to the altarpiece of S. Eufemia. To M.’s Venetian activity must also be attributed the cartoon for the mosaic of the Dormitio Virginis in the Cappella dei Mascoli in S. Marco, as well as the frieze of the Cornaro tomb at the Frari, rightly assigned to him by Fiocco.
After returning to Padua, M. completed, between 1457 and 1459, the altarpiece of S. Zeno in Verona, which successfully unified the three parts in the architectural conception of the quadrangular portico, within which the figures of the Virgin and the Saints are placed, and whose front side coincides with the frame.
The marble solemnity of the Paduan works returns in this imposing creation, but now seems to be animated by a warmer feeling of humanity, inspiring a magnificent series of Madonnas fondling the Child, in which infantile grace is captured—with great variety and originality of posture—with indescribable insight and gentleness. By contrast, the famous Dead Christ in Brera seems almost a sublime, though somewhat aridly abstract, exercise in the most difficult problems of anatomical perspective; and its prodigious foreshortening became a model for subsequent generations of painters.
In August 1460, M., after the marquis of Mantua had made countless entreaties to him, moved to that city, where he henceforth definitively attached his activity as a painter, and probably also as a sculptor and architect, to that court. A journey to Tuscany in 1467, to advise on the work at the Pisan cemetery, must have offered his inspiration a new, fresher, and broader range of expression, 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 these essentially modest themes of family life to an almost epic tone, through the grave dignity of their appearance, their monumental conception, and the breadth of their horizons. In the other masterpiece of the painter’s later years, the series of Triumphs, now much damaged, at Hampton Court, produced after a journey to Rome in 1488, a proud energy of sudden movements, together with a renewed and extremely lively interest in antiquarian studies, seems almost to indicate a partial return to earlier stylistic positions. These are powerful compositions in the plasticity of the individual figures, but perhaps somewhat confused and rhetorical in their rhythm, at times overwhelmed by an overly transparent precision in the minute descriptions. The final mythological canvases, completed by Costa for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este, are similarly somewhat cooled by a preoccupation with allegorical conceptualism. M. was also a great engraver. – Vedi tav. CXXVIII.