THE CAMERA DEGLI SPOSI, A.D. 1470-1474.
Recent research has brought to light a series of valuable letters between
the Gonzagas and Mantegna, which tell us little indeed about his existing
works, but much that is of the deepest interest concerning his private
life, and especially his relations with Lodovico and his family.
The Marquis had kept his word and proved himself a true friend and
generous patron to the Paduan artist. _Carissmé noster_, _dilecte
noster_, are the terms in which he always addresses him, and the
thoughtful consideration and patience with which he treated Andrea in
what must frequently have been very trying circumstances, are beyond all
praise.
The first letter of the series is a complaint which the painter, writing
from Goïto, addresses to Lodovico, saying that his stipend is irregularly
paid, a wrong which the Marquis promptly redressed. Three years later we
find him in the same liberal spirit advancing one hundred ducats which
Mantegna begged in order to decorate and improve his house in Mantua.
There our painter spent the winter with his wife and three
children—_tutto la mia brigatela_ he calls them in a letter to the
Marquis—and each year, when the summer heats returned, he moved to a
country-house at Buscoldo, where he afterwards received a grant of land
from his patron.
In 1466 he paid a visit to Florence, where he had at least one friend in
the learned Abbot of Fiesole, and a letter from Giovanni Aldobrandini,
an agent of Lodovico, describes the great respect with which he was
received, and the admiration excited by his varied accomplishments.
“Not only in painting but in other ways he showed remarkable knowledge
and most excellent understanding” is Aldobrandini’s testimony, and we
learn from other sources that he took much pleasure in poetry, and even
wrote verses himself. A sonnet of his composition addressed to a lady
whose name is unknown, and written in the fashionable Platonic style of
the day, has been discovered in the Mantuan archives and is given by
Moschini. As a collector of antiquities he had acquired considerable
reputation, and in 1472 we find the young Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga,
then at Bologna, begging his father that Mantegna may be sent to him that
he may have the pleasure of showing him his cameos, bronzes, and other
antiques.
Unfortunately the culture and refined taste which made Mantegna so
agreeable a companion were accompanied by an irritable temper, and a
readiness to take offence, which rendered him the reverse of a pleasant
neighbour. The most trifling contradictions were sufficient to excite
furious outbursts of anger on his part, and his letters to Lodovico are
full of the pettiest grievances. The Marquis, it must be said, treated
him with the utmost forbearance, and spared no pains to inquire into the
grounds of his complaints, however small. On one occasion he implores
Lodovico to punish a tailor who has spoilt a piece of his cloth, on
another he has quarrelled with a gardener and his wife who live in the
same street, and complains that neither he nor his wife can leave the
house without being attacked by insulting words. More serious was the
lawsuit in which he found himself involved with the engraver, Zoan
Andrea, whom he suspected of purloining his plates, and to whom he
administered a sound thrashing. Upon this Zoan Andrea had recourse to
legal measures, in which Mantegna seems to have fared badly, since he was
again compelled to seek the help of his powerful patron.
But of all Andrea’s quarrels, that which excited his greatest wrath
was his breach with his Buscoldo neighbour, Francesco Aliprandi, whom
he publicly accused of stealing five hundred quinces from a tree which
grew in his garden. There is a singular combination of the pathetic and
ludicrous in Mantegna’s description of the beauty of his fruit tree, with
its branches so heavily laden that they touched the ground. Each day he
looked upon it with fresh delight, until one September morning he found
all the quinces gone, and the tree stripped and bare. His anger knew no
bounds, and he did not hesitate to charge his nearest neighbours, the
Aliprandi, who he was convinced bore him secret ill-will with the theft.
Upon this Francesco Aliprandi, who seems to have been a citizen of good
birth, denied the charge indignantly, saying that during the two hundred
years his family had lived in Mantua, they had never been insulted by
so vile an epithet as that of thief, and complaining of Mantegna’s
disagreeable character as the real cause of all this disturbance. “No
one,” Aliprandi continues, “can live near him in peace, and at the
present moment he is engaged in lawsuits with no less than five of his
neighbours.” Even the Marquis was forced to admit this time that Andrea
was in the wrong, and, after carefully investigating the case, arrived at
the conclusion that the quinces had been stolen by some unknown thief.
This ruggedness of disposition and exaggerated susceptibility which,
by attaching excessive importance to the trifling cares of daily life,
proved a constant torment to Mantegna and those around him, remind
us curiously of Michelangelo, whom in more ways than one our master
resembled.
Like the great Florentine in this also, he never stooped to flattery or
servile expressions in addressing his patron. On the contrary, there is
from the first an independent spirit and proud consciousness of his own
merit which never deserts him, and he tells the Marquis repeatedly that
his coming to Mantua was a great favour on his part, and that no other
prince in Italy has so industrious an artist in his service.
The boast may not have sounded well in Mantegna’s lips, but it was a
true one. His activity was indefatigable, and whether he painted in
chapels and palaces, or made studies for tapestry or designs from the
turkey-cocks and hens which strutted in the court poultry-yard, his time
and powers were unreservedly placed at Lodovico’s disposal. What we have
to regret is that so little of all his splendid work is left, although
when we consider the subsequent history of Mantua, it is rather to be
wondered that anything has been saved from the general wreck.
In 1630, little more than a hundred years after Mantegna’s time, the city
was besieged during three months by the Imperialists, and ultimately
taken and sacked for three whole days. In 1797 it was again twice
besieged and bombarded by the French and Austrians, and during the wars
of the present century the ducal palace has been alternately occupied by
French and German soldiers. This once sumptuous pile is now the dreariest
and most desolate of palaces. The little life that still lingers in the
old town clusters round the market-place on the Piazza delle Erbe, and
grass grows on the deserted square which was once the centre of “Mantova
la Gloriosa.”
[Illustration: MEETING OF LODOVICO GONZAGA AND HIS SON, THE CARDINAL
FRANCESCO. BY MANTEGNA.
_In the Camera degli Sposi, at Mantua._]
We pass through endless suites of spacious halls paved with marble and
adorned with decaying frescoes and other remnants of faded splendour,
till we reach the older part of the palace known in the days of the
Gonzagas as the Castello di Corte. From its windows we look down on
the sleepy waters of the vast lagoon, which seems to divide Mantua
from the outer world, and over miles of swampy marshes, through which
“smooth-sliding Mincius” winds its way.
Here the Gonzagas hold their splendid court, here the banqueting-halls
where they feasted, the ball-rooms—the scenes of their revels and
masquerades—the suite of tiny apartments expressly built for the use of
the dwarfs, the courtyards where the dogs were kept, are still shown.
Here Mantegna painted, and here the walls of a room, now used to contain
the archives, were entirely covered with frescoes by himself.
This was the famous Camera degli Sposi, on which Andrea was engaged
between 1470 and 1474, and where he represented Lodovico Gonzaga and his
wife, Barbara of Brandenburg, surrounded by the different members of
their family.
All the frescoes have been much damaged, and those on two of the walls
completely obliterated; but the groups which remain and the decorations
of the ceiling are of the highest interest, and, if we except the
Hampton Court Triumphs, form the most important series that we have from
Mantegna’s hand.
On the east wall above the mantel-piece is the central group. Lodovico
and his wife, clad in rich brocaded robes, are seated in a garden
surrounded by their children, and dwarfs in the act of receiving a
messenger, who hands the Marquis a letter. Neither Lodovico nor any of
his family seem to have been remarkable for personal beauty, and Mantegna
has not made any attempt to embellish them. He paints them exactly as
they were, in the stiff costumes of the day. Barbara wears the same
veiled horn-shaped head-dress as in Andrea’s portrait-engraving in
the British Museum; the children and courtiers are in short jackets
and tight-fitting caps. Nothing is omitted that could complete the
picture, which is like a page torn out of the court life of those times;
a favourite greyhound lies asleep under Lodovico’s chair, and several
dwarfs positively repulsive in their ugliness are introduced. They
formed, we know, an important part of the household, since the Marquis
kept a particular race, bred at Mantua, and reserved a whole wing of his
palace, with staircases, halls, and bedrooms adapted to their stature,
for their exclusive use.
Beyond the fine figure of the courtier on the right, evidently the
painter’s own portrait, we have another compartment where the Marquis
stands at the head of the stairs welcoming his guests, or, as Selvatico
suggests, opening his arms to his son Federico, who had been in disgrace
for refusing to consent to a marriage which Lodovico had arranged for
him. This subject is much damaged, but on the entrance-wall is another
group, the best preserved of the three, in which the Marquis meets his
younger son, the boy-cardinal Francesco, on his return from Rome. The
composition is stiff and the dresses awkward, but nothing can surpass
the life-like character of the heads, whether we fix our eyes on the
baby-faces and demure air of the children who advance to welcome their
brother, or on the vigorous profiles of Lodovico and his courtiers. A
tame lion crouches at the feet of the Marquis, and a view of hills and
classical temples, intended to represent Rome, fills in the background.
On the opposite side of the doorway the servants and pages in attendance
are introduced holding their master’s horse, and several dogs in leash,
all admirably drawn; while above the door itself a charming group of
seven winged boys, in every possible attitude, support a tablet with the
following inscription:—
Ill Lodovico II. M.M.
Principi optimo ac
Fide invictissimo
Et Ill Barbaræ eius
Conjugi Mulierum Glor
Incomparabili
Suus Andreas Mantinia
Patavus opus hoc tenue
Ad eorum Decus absolvit.
Ann. MCCCCLXXIIII.
The grace and freshness of these boy-angels form a striking contrast to
the stiff figures on the walls, and both here and in the decorations of
the ceiling our painter, released from the obligations of portraiture,
allowed his fancy free play. Medallions of the Cæsars wreathed in laurel,
grisaille scenes from the myths of Hercules and Antæus, Orpheus, Apollo,
and the Tritons, occupy the vaulting of the ceiling; while in the centre
a circular opening is painted to represent a blue sky, across which white
clouds are floating by, as we see in actual reality in the Pantheon of
Rome. Round this open space runs a balustrade, upon which a peacock is
perched and a basket of fruit rests. Two women, a girl with a jewelled
head-dress and a negress, look down from above with laughing faces, while
a band of winged boys play on the edge of the stone-work.
These are the famous figures, _che scortano di sotto in sù_, which Vasari
says excited general admiration when Mantegna first painted them in the
Castle of Mantua.
Instead of treating the ceiling in the usual fashion, as another flat
surface on a level with the spectator’s eye, he endeavoured to represent
the figures he painted there as seen from below, and in reality looking
down over the balustrade. The optical illusion is effected in a
masterly way, and the playful boys, who push their heads through the
open stone-work of the parapet or balance themselves on its edge, are
admirably foreshortened.
Curiously enough, this new principle of ceiling decoration, which
in Corregio’s days was to become universal, and which Mantegna here
attempted for the first time, was employed at almost the same moment by
another painter, Melozzo da Forli, in his fresco of the “Glory of Heaven”
in the tribune of the Church of the SS. Apostoli at Rome. Whether the
two masters had ever been brought into personal contact we do not learn,
but we know that Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, in his rhyming
chronicle, gives Mantegna’s perspective the highest praise, and we may
infer from this that the great Lombard’s influence had penetrated far
enough south to reach the Umbrian artists.
The frescoes of the Camera degli Sposi were finished in 1474, and ten
years later it is recorded that Mantegna painted in another part of the
palace, known as the Scalcheria; but a ruined ceiling, with the same
circular opening and sportive Loves, is all that is left of his work
there.
Traces of his hand are also visible in another hall in some of the groups
of a large, much-injured fresco, where the first Gonzaga is represented
taking the oath as _Capitano del popolo_, and more especially in the
children holding a tablet which once bore a now-effaced inscription.
All else has perished. The lapse of time and the more cruel ravages of
man have swept away whatever other paintings once adorned these walls,
and the precious fragments of the Camera degli Sposi are absolutely the
only works of Mantegna that are still to be seen in this his adopted
city, where he spent well-nigh fifty years of his life.
[Illustration]