Fig. 218. Andrea Mantegna. Madonna with Saints.—San Zeno, Verona.
Before the completion of the Eremitani frescoes, Mantegna had married Niccolosia Bellini, had profited largely by her father’s advice, and had influenced strongly her two brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. They seem to have been the first eager pupils of the man who was soon to be the artistic schoolmaster for all Northern Italy. Two years after his marriage, in 1455, Mantegna liberated himself from legal bondage to Squarcione, and soon after began the masterpiece of his developed Renaissance style, the altar-back for San Zeno Maggiore at Verona, Figure [218]. It was finished in 1459, the artist being twenty-eight years old. It is a little over-rich, finished throughout like a miniature, and very stately. In arrangement it obeys the artist’s new law of illusion. The base of the picture is precisely at the level of the eye, so no floor is seen. The carved classical frame is regarded as the front of an actual pavillion which is continued in paint. Without the frame, the architectural perspective of the picture would not explain itself, and if the picture were set higher or lower all the perspective relations would be wrong. At Siena, a century and more earlier, the Lorenzetti had devised this motive of an open box of which the frame is the plastic front. Mantegna made this sort of illusionism standard for Venice and all Northern Italy. Its value is open to question, but I believe that the monumental altar-pieces of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini gain something in gravity and stability from this careful adjustment of the perspective to the actual position of the spectator. At any rate it was the rigid logic and probity of Mantegna that gave to Venetian art precisely the tonic stimulus it needed.
By thirty he was famous, and yielding to repeated persuasion, he left Padua for Mantua and the court of the most generous art patrons of the moment, the Gonzagas. His most notable work for them was the decoration of the Camera degli Sposi, 1474, in their great palace, and the canvases of the triumphs of Cæsar, 1481 to 1494, which, sadly damaged and repainted, are now seen at Hampton Court. The two series represent strikingly the dual and never completely harmonized strains in Mantegna’s genius—realism and archaism. He was never more the realist than in the room decorated in honor of the marriage of Lodovico Gonzaga and Barbara of Brandenburg, the Camera degli Sposi. The motives are wholly novel—no religious subjects, nothing mythological, just the Gonzaga family and their courtiers, sitting in conversation, meeting ceremoniously, or preparing for the hunt. Nowhere before had such a consistent use of the principle of illusionism been made, not even in Roman mural painting of the Antonine age. Mantegna has completely painted away the real walls of the room, and has replaced the real architecture by a simulated classical pavillion, with arcades looking out to the country side and a round opening above. All the figures are out of doors. To see the scheme properly you must stand precisely in the centre of the room and turn on your heel. The arrangement in short is periscopic. As you look up you will see a balcony with cupids, Figure [219], standing on the outside ledge and maids of honor and peacocks looking down over the balustrade. You see everything feet foremost as if it were actually there. Then you look out through the arcades where the view of outside doings is sometimes interrupted by a curtain. Generally it is drawn aside that you may see these great folk at ease outside their pleasure house, Figure [220]. The portraits are of utmost dignity and authority. In dealing with real people Mantegna’s style is less pinched than in his classical decorations. If I have insisted on the point of illusionism, it is only because the audacious logic of Correggio and a host of baroque followers for a century and more really grows out of this scheme at Mantua. You will see the open well with figures outside the parapet in Correggio’s dome at Parma, and the figures outside the painted roof in the Convent of St. Paolo. Indeed, you have only to let the clouds come down through such open roofs and seat decorative figures on the clouds to arrive at the fully developed baroque style. And it is odd enough that its most romantic extravagances are clearly deducible from this rather sober and pedantic illusionism of Andrea Mantegna.
Fig. 219. Mantegna. Detail of Ceiling.—Camera degli Sposi, Mantua.
Fig. 220. Mantegna. Portraits of the Gonzaga Family. Fresco.—Camera degli Sposi, Mantua.
Of the painted cloths representing the Triumphs of Cæsar, Figure [221], (1484–1492), nine remain in debased condition at Hampton Court, England. Here the classicism of Mantegna finds its most legitimate expression. The designs are better seen in the engravings of his school and in the later woodcut copies by Andreini.
Fig. 221. Mantegna. Triumph of Cæsar.—Hampton Court, England.