Dürer Society. [Portfolios] With Introductory Notes by Campbell Dodgson and Others. Series 1-10 (1898-1908). 311 reproductions. Index of Series 1-10. London. 1898-1908.
———. Publication No. 12. 24 reproductions. London. 1911.
ITALIAN ENGRAVING: MANTEGNA TO
MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI
ANDREA MANTEGNA is, both by his art and his influence, the most significant figure in early Italian engraving. His method or viewpoint is a determining feature in much of the best work which was produced during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, until the influence of Raphael, transmitted through Marcantonio, with a technical mode based upon the manner of Albrecht Dürer, completely changed the current of Italian engraving, seducing it from what might have developed into an original creative art, and condemned it to perpetual servitude as the handmaid of painting.
Andrea Mantegna, born in 1431, at Vicenza, and consequently Pollaiuolo’s senior by one year, was adopted, at the age of ten, by Squarcione, in Padua. Squarcione appears to have been less a painter than a contractor, undertaking commissions to be executed by artists in his employ. He was likewise a dealer in antiquities, and in his shop the young Mantegna must have met many of the leading humanists who had made Padua famous as a seat of classical learning. From them he drew in and absorbed that passion for imperial Rome which was to color his life and his art. His dream was of forms more beautiful than those of everyday life, built of some substance finer and less perishable than the flesh of frail humanity; and as years went by his work takes on, in increasing measure, a grander and more majestic aspect. Fortunate for us is it that in his mature period, when his style was fully formed, he himself was impelled, by influences of which later we shall speak, to take up the graving tool and with it produce the seven imperishable masterpieces which, beyond peradventure, we may claim as his authentic work.
The Virgin and Child, the earliest of his engravings, can hardly have been executed before 1475, and maybe not until after 1480, when Mantegna had reached his fiftieth year. Mr. Hind points out that there is a simplicity and directness about it which recalls quite early work, similarly conceived, such as the Adoration of the Kings of 1454; but the reasons which he advances are of equal weight in assigning it to a later date, and I am convinced that the intensity of mother-love expressed in the poise and face of the Virgin betokens a deeper feeling, a broader humanity, than one normally would expect in a youth of twenty-three, even though he be illumined with that flame of genius which burned so brightly in Mantegna.
ANDREA MANTEGNA. VIRGIN AND CHILD
Size of the original engraving, 9¾ × 8⅛ inches
In the British Museum
