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MANTEGNA, ANDREA (1431-1506), one of the chief heroes in the advance of
painting in Italy, was born in Vicenza, of very humble parentage. It is
said that in his earliest boyhood Andrea was, like Giotto [1267-1337],
put to shepherding or cattle-herding; this is not likely, and can at any
rate have lasted only a very short while, as his natural genius for art
developed with singular precocity, and excited the attention of
Francesco Squarcione [1397-1468], who entered him in the gild of
painters before he had completed his eleventh year.
Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a
remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a proportionate faculty for
acting, with profit to himself and others, as a sort of artistic
middleman; his own performances as a painter were merely mediocre. He
travelled in Italy, and perhaps in Greece also, collecting antique
statues, reliefs, vases, &c., forming the largest collection then
extant of such works, making drawings from them himself, and throwing
open his stores for others to study from, and then undertaking works on
commission for which his pupils no less than himself were made
available. As many as one hundred and thirty-seven painters and
pictorial students passed through his school, established towards 1440
which became famous all over Italy. Mantegna was, as he deserved to be,
Squarcione's favorite pupil. Squarcione adopted him as his son, and
purposed making him the heir of his fortune. Andrea was only seventeen
when he painted, in the church of S. Sofia in Padua, a Madonna picture
of exceptional and recognized excellence. He was no doubt fully aware of
haying achieved no common feat, as he marked the work with his name and
the date, and the years of his age. This painting was destroyed in the
17th century.
As the youth progressed in his studies, he came under the influence of
Jacopo Bellini [c.1400-1470], a painter considerably, superior to
Squarcione, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni [c.1430-1516] and
Gentile [c.1429-1507], and of a daughter Nicolosia; and in 1454 Jacopo
gave Nicolosia to Andrea in marriage. This connection of Andrea with the
pictorial rival of Squarcione is generally assigned as the reason why
the latter became alienated from the son of his adoption, and always
afterwards hostile to him. Another suggestion, which rests, however,
merely on its own internal probability, is that Squarcione had at the
outset used his pupil Andrea as the unavowed executant of certain
commissions, but that after a while Andrea began painting on his own
account, thus injuring the ptofessional interests of his chief. The
remarkably definite and original style formed by Mantegna may be traced
out as founded on the study of the antique in Squarcione's atelier,
followed by a diligent application of principles of work exemplified by
Paolo Uccello [1397-1475] and Donatello [1386-1466], with the practical
guidance and example of Jacopo Bellini in the sequel.
Among the other early works of Mantegna are the fresco of two saints
over the entrance porch of the church of S. Antonio in Padua, 1452, and
an altar-piece of St Luke and other saints for the church of S.
Giustina, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan, 1453. It is probable,
however, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione,
including Mantegna, had already begun that series of frescoes in the
chapel of S. Cristoforo, in the church of S. Agostino degli Eremitani,
by, which the great painter's reputation was fully confirmed, and which
remain to this day conspicuous among his finest achievements. The now
censorious Squarcione found much to carp at in the earlier works of this
series, illustrating the life of St James; he said the figures were
like men of stone, and had better have been coloured stone-colour at
once. Andrea, conscious as he was of his own great faculty and mastery,
seems nevertheless to have felt that there was something in his old
preceptor's strictures; and the later subjects, from the legend of St
Christopher, combine with his other excellences more of natural
character and vivacity. Trained as he had been to the study of marbles
and the severity of the antique, and openly avowing that he considered
the antique superior to nature as being more eclectic in form, he now
and always affected precision of outline, dignity of idea and of figure,
and he thus tended towards rigidity, and to an austere wholeness rather
than gracious sensitiveness of expression. His draperies are tight and
closely folded, being studied (as it is said) from models draped in
paper and woven fabrics gummed. Figures slim, muscular and bony, action
impetuous but of arrested energy, tawny landscape, gritty with littering
pebbles, mark the athletic hauteur of his style. He never changed,
though he developed and perfected, the manner which he had adopted in
Padua; his colouring, at first rather neutral and undecided,
strengthened and matured. There is throughout his works more balancing
of colour than fineness of tone. One of his great aims was optical
illusion, carried out by a mastery of perspective which, though not
always impeccably correct, nor absolutely superior in principle to the
highest contemporary point of attainment, was worked out by himself with
strenuous labor, and an effect of actuality astonishing in those times.
The works painted by Mantegna, apart from his frescoes, are not
numerous; some thirty-five to forty are regarded as fully
.authehticated. We may name, besides those already, specified in the
Naples Museum, St Euphemia, a fine early work; in Casa Melii, Milan, the
Madonna and Child with Chanting Angels (1461); in the Tribune of the
Uffizi, Florence, three pictures remarkable for scrupulous finish; in
the Berlin Museum, the Dead Christ with two Angels; in the Louvre, the
two celebrated pictures of mythic allegory Parnassus and Minerva
Triumphing over the Vices; in the National Gallery, London, the Agony in
the Garden, the Virgin and Child Enthroned, with the Baptist and the
Magdalen, a late example; the monochrome of Vestals, brought from
Hamilton Palace; the Triumph of Scipio (or Phrygian Mother of the Gods
received by the Roman Commonwealth), a tempera in chiaroscuro, painted
only a few months before the master's death; in the Brera, Milan, the
Dead Christ, with the two Manes weeping, a remarkable tour de force in
the way of foreshortening, which, though it has a stunted appearance, is
in correct technical perspective as seen from all points of view. With
all its exceptional merit, this is an eminently ugly picture. It
remained in Mantegna's studio unsold at his death, and was disposed of
to liquidate debts.
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