Mantegna

MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY . . T. LEMAN HARE
ANDREA MANTEGNA
1431-1506
“Masterpieces in Colour” Series
Others in Preparation.
PLATE I.—THE MADONNA DELLA VITTORIA. Frontispiece
(In the Louvre)
This beautiful composition, considered one of Mantegna’s greatest masterpieces, was painted in 1495-96 in commemoration of the victory won at Fornovo on July 6, 1494, by the Marquis of Mantua as generalissimo of the united Italian forces. It is now in the Louvre, Paris, having been carried off by the French in 1797.
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.


Born at a time of exceptional intellectual and æsthetic activity, when Italian humanism was nearing its fullest development, and the art of painting, after a protracted struggle with mechanical difficulties, had at last obtained an almost complete mastery over its media, with a real grasp of the long-neglected science of perspective, Andrea Mantegna may justly be said to have been a true representative of the early Renaissance in Italy, an earnest combatant in the arduous struggle for liberty of thought and expression in which so many of his gifted fellow-countrymen were engaged. A true kindred spirit of his greater contemporary, Donatello, with whom he was in closer rapport than with any painter, the chief characteristic of his work being the plastic rather than the pictorial treatment of form, he was, like him, imbued from the first with a reverent love of truth and a conscientious desire faithfully to interpret it. Mantegna has, indeed, been sometimes charged with a too close imitation of the famous sculptor, but this is manifestly unfair, for, although there can be no doubt that he owed much to Donatello, who was the first to lead him into the right path, by showing him how Nature should be studied, the secret of the strong resemblance between the styles of the two masters is that both went to the same source for inspiration: the best existing examples of antique sculpture, which appeared to them the noblest extant expression of the ideal in the real.