Despite such great commissions, Mantegna lived in something near poverty. He could never resist a beautiful antique, and he was proud and difficult in his relations to exacting patrons. His style after his Roman visit of 1488 to 1490 loses something of its tension and develops breadth. Perhaps the most impressive picture of this time is the Madonna of Victory, Figure [222], in the Louvre, which was painted in 1495 to celebrate Gianfrancesco Gonzaga’s drawn battle with the French at Fornovo. Its severity is mollified by the graciousness of the evergreen bower in which the group is set and by the contrasting seriousness of St. Elizabeth and the kneeling donor. These figures forecast a mystical and tender quality in certain of the later Madonnas.
In his last years Mantegna undertook an attractive but difficult task in decorating the study of the famous bluestocking, Isabella d’Este, wife of Gianfrancesco. With the pertinacity of a suffragette born out of due time, this great lady framed the most elaborate written programmes, upon the literal accomplishment of which she insisted. Her correspondence with such unfortunate protegés as Perugino and Lorenzo Costa is among the delightful eccentricities of Renaissance annals. The resultant decorations reflect the sophisticated and somewhat brittle grace of Isabella’s own personality. None are better than those of Mantegna which were done about the year 1500. His Parnassus, Figure [223], with its romantically picturesque gods and godesses, and its admirable round of dancing muses, is the best that Northern Italy can show in comparison with Botticelli’s mythologies, unless it be the companion piece, Minerva expelling the Vices, Figure [224], which is wonderful alike in energy, inventiveness and grotesque humor, anticipating in its mood similar refinements in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and Milton’s “Comus.” Mantegna in these works becomes the true precursor of that poetic pastoralism which in Giorgione soon dominates the Venetian scene.
Fig. 222. Mantegna. Madonna of Victory.—Louvre.
Fig. 223. Mantegna. Parnassus.—Louvre.
Fig. 224. Mantegna. Minerva Expelling the Vices.—Louvre.
Mantegna lived on, none too well treated by the younger Gonzagas, until 1506. To relieve his poverty he offered for sale his most treasured marble, an Agrippina. He left in his studio his most rigid and painful piece,—the Foreshortened Christ he called it. All his probity is in the picture. For Giovanni Bellini and others it served as the highest model of the tragic style, and it refutes the shallow views of such as find Mantegna merely academic and cold. He left many engravings and marvellous drawings in which perhaps better than in the paintings we may feel the exquisiteness of his austerely fastidious taste. Such a drawing as the Judith in the Uffizi, Figure [225], is an epitome of all that Mantegna had to bequeath to the Renaissance.
Well his contemporaries knew the value of his example. It rebuked the slackness of their own practice. Alongside the exquisitely modelled foot of his St. Sebastian in the Louvre, stands the severed marble foot from a Greek statue. As he ever measured his work against the antique, so the painters of Milan, Vicenza, Ferrara, Verona and Venice had to measure their work against his. And that simple act of honest comparison in a single generation furthered the art of Northern Italy to a degree that in Tuscany it had taken a century to attain.