WORK AT VERONA AND MANTUA, A.D. 1457-1470.
The exact date of the completion of the Eremitani frescoes is uncertain,
but they were probably finished by 1458, perhaps earlier. Mantegna was
still a young man, not more than six or seven-and-twenty, but in actual
power as well as in reputation second to no living painter in North Italy.
We have already noticed the chief influences brought to bear on his early
training. One by one we have watched him discover and assimilate, with
the same clearness of intellect and indefatigable energy, the peculiar
virtue of each successive artist with whom he was brought into contact.
We have seen him add Florentine principles to Squarcione’s teaching,
learn from Donatello how to combine the study of nature with the laws of
sculpture, gain from Uccelli that knowledge of perspective which had for
him so subtle a fascination, and last of all temper this fiery genius
under the gentler spell of Gian Bellini’s more genial art.
Another and a very important element in his development was the constant
intercourse which he maintained with the most learned Paduan scholars,
and the keen pleasure with which he joined in their antiquarian
researches in the neighbourhood. He accompanied Felice Feliciano, a
famous collector of inscriptions, on several excursions in the environs
of Verona and the Lago di Garda for the express purpose of examining
classical remains, and in 1463 this same Feliciano dedicated his work on
ancient epigrams to the painter, whose learning he extols in the highest
terms. One result of these explorations in the classic ground of Sermione
appears in the fragments of Latin inscriptions which are repeatedly
introduced, in the Eremitani frescoes, and on one Roman portico the
name of Vitruvius Cerdo, a Verona architect of ancient days, is still
distinctly legible.
This practice was a common one with many of the artists of Squarcione and
Mantegna’s school, who, in their genuine enthusiasm for classical art,
copied antique monuments and inscriptions with the minutest accuracy, and
afterwards used them as accessory portions of their own compositions.
We have a notable example of this habit in the drawing of a pagan altar
bearing an inscription to the effect that it was found in a vault of
the Baths of Caracalla, then known as the Antonine palace at Rome. The
drawing, evidently by the hand of some Paduan artist, is now preserved at
Christ Church, Oxford.
Besides Feliciano, Andrea numbered among his intimate friends several
eminent scholars then studying at the University of Padua, such as Matteo
Bossi, afterwards Abbot of Fiesole, and the Hungarian bishop Giovanni
Pannonio, who celebrated the artist’s genius in Latin verse as early as
1458, and whose portrait Mantegna painted in the same year.
This rare degree of culture which made him the friend of scholars, this
genuine delight in classical studies and antique art, was destined to
supply our master with some of his highest inspirations, and ultimately
render him the foremost representative among painters of that enthusiasm
for antiquity which was the ruling passion of Italy in the fifteenth
century.
During the years that Andrea was employed on the Eremitani frescoes we
hear little else of his private life excepting that he married Niccolosia
Bellini, and became estranged from his old master Squarcione, while two
panel pictures, the Brera Altar-piece which he painted in 1454 for Santa
Giustina, and the “St. Euphemia” now at Naples, are the only other works
that are left us of this period. In the former, a vigorous but not very
pleasing work, St. Luke is represented writing at a table between four
single figures of saints, while above we have a Pietà with the Virgin,
St. John, and four other saints. Far more graceful in conception is the
St. Euphemia standing in her garlanded niche with the lily in her hand
and the lion beside her. This admirably drawn figure in attitude and form
closely resembles an antique statue, and will bear comparison, with the
best of the later frescoes.
So far, Andrea’s works had been confined to Padua, but his fame had
spread far beyond his native city, and before he had finished his labours
in the Eremitani, pressing invitations to move to Mantua had reached
him from Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of that principality. This prince, a
generous patron of letters as well as a brave soldier and wise ruler,
was anxious to make his court a centre of art and learning; and, having
failed in his efforts to attract the aged Donatello, spared no pains to
secure the services of the Paduan artist, whose rising genius was already
eclipsing that of all others. As early as 1456 we find Lodovico entering
into communication with Andrea, first by letter and then through the
sculptor Luca Fancelli, a confidential agent of the Marquis. His offers
were liberal; fifteen ducats a month, lodging, firewood, and sufficient
wheat to feed the members of his family, who are reckoned as six in
number; besides, he proposed to assist him on his journey to Mantua by
sending a boat to meet him.
Mantegna lent a willing ear to these proposals, but his hands were full,
and flattering as were Lodovico’s entreaties and assurances of good-will,
he was slow to comply with the request. In his letters he assigns first
one reason, then another, for delaying his departure. First, he asks
for time to execute an order given him by Gregorio Corraro, Abbot of
San Zeno of Verona, and protonotary to the Apostolic See. Then he begs
for six months more to complete the work, then for another respite in
order to do a little piece for the Podestà of Padua. The Marquis bore
all these delays with unalterable patience and courtesy, while he never
for a moment relaxed his efforts to bring the artist to Mantua, and
redoubled his assurance of favour. If Andrea will only come, he says
again and again, and himself prove the truth of the promises made to him,
he will every day of his life find greater cause to rejoice that he has
entered the service of the Gonzagas. When the summer of 1459 came and the
protonotary’s altar-piece was still unfinished, Lodovico suggested as a
last resource that the panels should be brought to Mantua and completed
there. To this proposal the abbot was too wise a man to consent, and he
would not even allow Mantegna to visit Mantua for a day until the picture
had been safely delivered into his hands.
This altar-piece, of which we hear so much in Lodovico’s correspondence
with our master, was the “Madonna and Saints” in San Zeno, of Verona,
taken to Paris in 1797, but now restored (without its predella) to its
place, and one of the finest religious compositions that Andrea ever
painted. All the chief characteristics of Andrea’s Paduan time are
here brought together in a more elevated form, and for the first time
we realise fully how great was the progress he had made since the days
when he began to paint in the Eremitani Chapel. Nothing can exceed the
simple dignity and grace of the youthful virgin, who sits erect under
a portico decorated with a frieze of children bearing festoons of
fruit, through which we see a thick growth of trees, and open space
of blue sky beyond. On the pillars of the portico are medallions in
which Andrea has after his usual habit introduced reliefs of classical
subjects, one of which is a horse-tamer, evidently copied from the
famous “Twins,” of Monte Cavallo, and curious as adopted by a painter
who had not yet visited Rome. The saints who stand in the groups on
either side of the Madonna’s throne are still too much treated as
isolated figures, but each statue-like form has a grandeur of its own,
and the graceful heads of the young St. John and St. Lawrence contrast
finely with those of the aged apostles and fathers of the Church, while
in the boy-angels who play on the steps of the throne, or sing with
wide-parted lips, we have the first of those child-faces whose laughing
eyes look down from many of Mantegna’s pictures and seem to give us a
foretaste of Raphael’s sweetness. Unfortunately, the different parts of
the predella that belonged to this beautiful altar-piece are scattered
in different galleries, the “Gethsemane” and “Ascension” are at Tours,
the “Crucifixion,” in the dramatic action of its varied group by far the
finest of the three, is in the Louvre.
According to Vasari, Mantegna painted several other pictures in Verona,
but the only other traces of his work now remaining in that city are some
equestrian figures and chiaroscuro decorations on the façade of a house
near San Fermo Maggiore, and we have no proof of his ever having resided
there.
The “little piece” which Andrea executed for Giacomo Marcello, Podestà
of Padua, has been identified in the “Christ on the Mount of Olives” of
the Baring collection, a work in which we feel the same union of plastic
tendency of form and strong realism that strikes us in the frescoes. In
the background, a wild and savage landscape, the desolate aspect of which
is heightened by the presence of cranes and birds of prey, we recognise
the city of Padua with the Eremitani Church.
If we compare this picture with the well-known rendering of the same
subject by Giovanni Bellini in the National Gallery, we shall see how
much of the original conception and drawing the Venetian artist borrowed
from his brother-in-law, and at the same time how well he knew how to
modify Andrea’s severer style by his own more delicate grace and feeling
for colour.
These altar-pieces were Mantegna’s last works in his native city. The
patience of the Marquis was at length rewarded, and towards the close of
the year 1459, Andrea moved to Mantua with his family. Soon afterwards
Jacopo Bellini died, his sons moved to Venice, and the Paduan school of
painting, left in the hands of inferior followers of Squarcione, came to
a practical end.
But Paduan art lived on in the work of her greatest son, and the new
influences and surroundings of Mantegna’s adopted city gave fresh impulse
to his creative energy.
That he settled at Mantua before the end of 1459 is proved by a letter
of his written to the Marquis in May, 1478, in which he speaks of having
been almost nineteen years in Lodovico’s service, but it is not till the
spring of 1463 that we hear of him as engaged in painting at Goïto, one
of the summer villas belonging to the Gonzagas. Both this palace and
the neighbouring Castle of Cavriana, where he also painted, have been
destroyed, and a few panel pictures now dispersed throughout Europe are
the only productions that remain of his first ten years’ residence at the
Court of Mantua.
Chief among these is the Uffizi triptych, which originally belonged to
a chapel of the Gonzagas, and may be the very picture to which Andrea
alludes in a letter of 1464 as destined for the little chapel, and which
Vasari tells us contained many small but most beautiful figures.
The “Adoration of the Magi” forms the subject of the central panel, while
the “Ascension” and the “Presentation in the Temple” are represented
on the wings. All three are marked by the miniature-like finish which
reveals the thoroughly practised hand and loving zeal of one who took
delight in carrying his work to the highest possible perfection.
In the seated Virgin, of the strong type of womanhood which Andrea
seems to prefer, with the flight of cherubs encircling her head, and
the patches of rough herbage starting out of the rocks behind her, we
recognise the original of his own unfinished engraving, the “Virgin of
the Grotto.” The red cherub-heads, which remind us of the similar wreath
with which Giovanni Bellini surrounds one of his Madonnas in the Academy
of Venice, are again introduced in “The Ascension.” Here the group of
apostles, who gaze upwards, have more of the slender form used by Pizzolo
in the Eremitani frescoes, and the panel is inferior as a whole to “The
Presentation.”
This is in Mantegna’s best manner, the principal figures full of grace
and dignity, the heads excellent in expression, especially that of the
child sucking his finger as he leans against his mother, while Andrea’s
historic feeling appears in the typical reliefs of “Moses breaking
the Tables” and “Abraham sacrificing Isaac,” which adorn the altar.
Another fine rendering of this subject by Mantegna is now in the Berlin
Gallery, which also possesses two other works belonging to this period, a
half-length “Madonna holding the Child on a Parapet,” and a portrait of
an old ecclesiastic.
Probably this Madonna was the very one of which Vasari speaks as painted
by Mantegna, for his old friend, the famous orator, Matteo Bossi, Abbot
of Fiesole, since the frame decorated with angels and instruments
of the Passion exactly corresponds with his description, and the
strikingly-truthful portrait may well be that of the Abbot himself,
whose friendship for the painter neither time nor distance seems to have
impaired.
A “Death of the Virgin,” with a view of Mantua and its lake seen through
a colonnade, now at Madrid, and chiaroscuro figures known as “Summer” and
“Autumn,” now at Hamilton Palace, may be mentioned as painted about 1470,
when Andrea was engaged in works at the Castle of Mantua.
More interesting in the eyes of most of us are the two small pictures
of the Saints Sebastian and George, two youthful figures intended to
show the contrast of suffering and repose. In the “St. Sebastian” now at
Vienna, Mantegna has deliberately set himself the task of representing
the human form wrung by physical agony, and the divine strength of a
will that can conquer pain by the power of its endurance. His success
was complete, and among the countless representations of martyrdom that
exist, there is scarcely a finer example than this St. Sebastian bound to
the ruined column and pierced with arrows, lifting his eyes heavenwards
in his mortal agony. At his feet lie broken statues and marbles,
shattered fragments of the old world that was crumbling to ruins around,
and which by the delicate grace of their shapes and mouldings help to
associate ideas of beauty with this scene of suffering and death.
The opposite of this picture meets us in the armed “St. George” of the
Venice Academy, who stands under an archway garlanded with flowers,
leaning on his lance in satisfied repose of victory, with the dragon dead
at his feet. His classical head is not unlike the youthful saints of the
Verona altar-piece, while the highly finished character of the execution
approaches the style of the Uffizi triptych, evidently painted about the
same time.
To these we may add the wonderful “Dead Christ” of the Brera, a work
almost terrible in its realism, and exaggerated foreshortening, but
which reveals in a surprising degree Mantegna’s mastery both in drawing
and management of light and shade. This _Cristo in Scurto_ was one of
those daring trials of skill which he loved to attempt, not to please
the eye or gratify the taste of his employers, but simply in order to
overcome some difficulty or solve some problem from which a less powerful
mind would have shrunk.
The satisfaction which he felt in the success of this experiment is
proved by his unwillingness to part with this work, which never left his
studio until his death, when it is mentioned by his son in the list of
paintings that were sold to pay his debts.
In the same style as this “Pietà,” but with more attempt at decorative
effect, is the picture exhibited by Sir William Abdy, in the last winter
exhibition at Burlington House (1880-81). Here the dead Christ lies on
a carved throne of coloured marbles, the back of which is formed by the
broken tables of the law. On either side are two grandly defined forms of
Isaiah and Jerome, as representatives of the old and new dispensations,
between whom Christ stands. The background is more elaborate than
usual. On one side is a wild tract of mountainous country, on the other
a river and fertile valley, along the slopes of which we see rows of
smiling villages, church-towers, and fields enclosed with hedges.
In the foreground skulls and bones are scattered at the feet of the
prophets, and beasts and birds of gay plumage enliven the scene. A stag
and panther and a red parrot are prominent figures, but all these minor
details are subdued to the leading idea in the painter’s mind. Doubts
have been entertained as to the authorship of the picture, but both its
general style and colouring and the presence of that weird grandeur of
imagination peculiar to Mantegna are strong proofs of its genuineness.
[Illustration]