_Andrea Mantegna_ (Paduan: 1431-1506). _See 274._
One of the _grisailles_, or pictures in gray and brown, of which
Mantegna in his later years painted very many, and to multiply which
he took to engraving. In its subject the picture is a piece of ancient
Rome. No other works of the time, it has been said, are so full of
antique feeling as Mantegna's. Botticelli played with the art of the
ancients and modernised it; Mantegna actually lived and moved in it
(Woltmann and Woermann: _History of Painting_, translated by Clara
Bell, ii. 378). Mantegna's classical scholarship, too, is abundantly
shown in the details of this picture, which is full of allusions to
Latin authors and history. The Triumph of Scipio, it may be briefly
explained, consisted in his being selected by the Senate as "the
worthiest man in Rome," by whom alone--so the oracle decreed--must
Cybele, the Phrygian mother of the gods, be received. It was "an
honour," says Livy, with the fine patriotism of Rome, "more to be
coveted than any other which the Senate or people could bestow." On
the left, the image of the goddess is being borne on a litter, and
with it the sacred stone alleged to have fallen from heaven. It was an
unusual fall of meteoric stones that had caused the Romans to consult
the oracle in B.C. 204, during Hannibal's occupation of Italy, and the
oracle had answered that the Phrygian mother must be brought to Rome.
This goddess, worshipped under different forms in many parts of the
world, was a personification of the passive generative power in nature,
and from this time forward she was included among the recognised
divinities of the Roman State. In the centre of the picture Scipio and
his retinue are receiving her; whilst Claudia, a Roman lady, has thrown
herself before the image. Some slur had attached to her reputation, but
she had proved her innocence by invoking the goddess and then drawing
off from a shoal in the harbour of Ostia, with the aid of only a slight
rope, the vessel which bore the sacred image.
"The picture," says Sir F. Burton, "has a history of its own. It was
undertaken towards the close of Mantegna's long and laborious career;
and when that career terminated in the sadness and gloom which have
too often awaited those whose imaginative powers had placed them
above their fellow-men, it remained in his studio, probably not fully
finished. It may have been the last, it was certainly one of the last,
pictures which his pencil touched." An advance payment of 25 ducats had
been made to Mantegna in 1504. His son Francesco made an unsuccessful
claim to it as an inheritance from his father, offering to repay the
amount received in advance. The picture, representing an event glorious
in the history of the Scipios, was commissioned by a Venetian nobleman,
Francesco Cornaro, in order to throw lustre upon the genealogy of his
family, which claimed to belong to the Roman _gens Cornelia_.