Fig. 215. Carlo Crivelli. Pietà.—Boston.
Crivelli’s[[72]] fame was great but provincial. Originally most of his altar-pieces adorned churches of the Adriatic Marches. Dozens have passed thence to the museums of Europe and America. One and all they seem less painted things than the most splendid of mineral productions. It is incredible that mere brush and paint can achieve so tense a line and such jewel-like surfaces. Entirely typical is an early Madonna, at Verona, Figure [214]. The great ancona of 1476 in the National Gallery shows him faithful to the arrangements of the early Venetians. The Annunciation, in the same gallery, painted ten years later, reveals him affected by the narrative tradition of Jacopo Bellini. In America fine Pietàs at Boston, Figure [215], New York, and in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, exemplify his rectitude and energy. While Mrs. Gardner’s St. George and the Dragon, as the most fastidious of fairy tales, consoles us for the absence of this subject among the few pictures of Jacopo Bellini. From his beginnings about 1460 to his death in 1493, Carlo Crivelli remained true to his early teaching. Whoever understands his works has little need to consult further the entirely similar achievement of such great Ferrarese painters as Marco Zoppo (1440 ca.–1498) and Cosimo Tura (1430 ca.–1495). The influence of Squarcione passed to the conservative painters at Venice, and influenced the entire Murano school. We have a resplendent masterpiece of this sort in the single known work of Antonio da Negroponte, Figure [216], in San Francesco della Vigna, at Venice. It combines with its evident Squarcionesque features, the magnificence of the old Gothic-Byzantine style, and much of the sweetness of Jacopo Bellini. Its date is about 1450, and the picture is an excellent point of departure for our understanding of the radical reform that came into Venice and all Lombardy with the activity of Andrea Mantegna.
Fig. 216. Fra Antonio da Negroponte. Madonna.—S. Francesco della Vigna.
Born in 1431 at Vicenza, we find Mantegna[[73]] enrolled at the tender age of thirteen in the painters’ guild at Padua. He is described as an adoptive son of Squarcione. Mantegna was scarcely twenty-four when he engaged with other fellow pupils to decorate a chapel in the Church of the Eremitani, the subject being the legends of St. James and St. Christopher. In the six panels assigned to Mantegna, his quality and superiority are already manifest. His style is severely archæological and Roman. He endeavors honestly to reconstruct the times of the apostles. But his method is more severe than that of the Romans themselves. The line moves with the slow authority of an engraved contour. The relief is dry and harsh. There is little sense of difference between living forms and sculptured figures. The landscape is built in spiral strata as if worked out of metal. Here transpires clearly the influence of Jacopo Bellini, which is as evident also in the ornate architectural settings. The colors are at once dull and garish, the textures scrupulously studied after Squarcione’s precepts. A most strenuous art this, and with all its pedantry full of power and dignity.
Fig. 217. Mantegna. St. James led to Execution. Fresco.—Eremitani, Padua.
Certain innovations in perspective should be noted. In the fresco, St. James led to Execution, Figure [217], Mantegna avoids the usual conventional perspective, which tilts the picture towards the spectator; and treats the group as if it were on an actual stage set at the height of the fresco. Thus no ground is seen; the projecting floor cuts off the feet of the figures; and all vanishing points are precisely set at the level of the spectator’s eye below. The aim is to create illusion.
