Not only as a painter but as an engraver did Mantegna win great renown during his lifetime and abiding fame after his death. He and his gifted contemporary, Antonio Pollaiuolo, were the first Italians to employ copperplate engravings for original work and the reproduction of their drawings, and a very great impulse was given by them to the useful craft.
The closing months of Mantegna’s life are involved in an obscurity as great as that shrouding his early years. It is not even known of what he died, some saying that he was suddenly carried off by the plague which was raging in Mantua at the time, others that the end had long been expected, and that old age was his only ailment. The sad event took place at seven o’clock in the evening, on September 13, 1506, and the news was formally notified to the Marquis two days later by Francesco Mantegna; but, probably because of the great anxieties by which the Gonzagas were then oppressed, very little notice was taken of what under other circumstances would have overwhelmed them with grief.
Andrea Mantegna was quietly buried in the chapel in S. Andrea, Mantua, that he had long since secured as the last resting-place of his family, and which, except for the completion of the unfinished frescoes, remains to the present day very much what it was at the time of his death. It was not until fifty years later that the bronze bust, already referred to, was set up outside the chapel by his grandson Andrea, son of Lodovico Mantegna, who also erected within the building a fine memorial to his grandfather, father, and uncle, bearing the inscription, “Ossa Andreæ Mantineæ famosissimi pictoris cum duobus filiis in hoc sepulcro per Andream Mantineæ nepotem ex filio constructo reposita MDLX.”
In addition to the well-authenticated paintings, frescoes, and engravings described above, a very great number of other works, including easel pictures, drawings, and miniatures, have been attributed to Mantegna, who is also said to have occasionally practised sculpture. Moreover, literary evidence proves that nearly one hundred compositions designed and executed by him have been lost, amongst which are specially to be regretted the portraits of his various patrons of the Gonzaga family and, above all, that of the Duchess Elizabetta of Urbino, who was one of the most beautiful and influential women of her time, beloved by young and old, and for whom her brilliant sister-in-law, Isabella d’Este, had a most fervent admiration. Even without these missing treasures, however, the court painter of Mantua left behind him masterpieces enough to secure to him a lasting fame as one of the pioneers of the Renaissance of painting in Italy.
The fact that Mantegna passed away on the very threshold of the Golden Age, during which Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, and Correggio, each the founder of a great school, produced their world-famous works, has led to his achievements having been comparatively neglected; but of late years his claims have gradually become more fully recognised, and he now takes high rank as a consistent and persevering exponent of a high ideal. His intense individuality was from the first hostile to imitation, but his influence was long felt in the art world, and many artists who were associated with him in Padua and Mantua later carried on his traditions to some extent in Verona, Ferrara, Modena, Bologna, and Milan. Jacopo da Montagnana was, perhaps, the master who most closely resembled him, some of his work having been actually attributed to Mantegna; but Francesco Benaglio, Liberate da Verona, Francesco Moroni, Girolamo dai Libri, Marco Zoppo, Cosimo Tura, and Lorenzo da Costa owed much to their study of his masterpieces—the last named, who succeeded him as court painter at Mantua, reproducing in his later compositions something of the characteristic style of his predecessor in that office.
It has even been claimed that Correggio, who, according to a long-accepted but now discredited tradition, was supposed to have been the actual pupil of Mantegna, derived much of his inspiration from the older painter. “Both artists,” says Dr. Kristeller in an able examination of the points of affinity between them, “penetrate to the very core of the subject, to the purely human emotion latent within it: equally sensitive and elevated in spirit, both strive enthusiastically after a superhuman existence, full of an enhanced joy in life.... Both seek to break through the confines of the earthly to secure, in immeasurable space, free scope for the power and the magnitude of their figures. The voluptuous swinging lines, the ideally beautiful forms of Mantegna’s figures in his later works, their sweet and thoughtful expression of tranquil bliss and spiritual emotion is in Correggio’s creations only heightened by the passionate sensuousness of his own outlook on the world, by the utmost vivacity of movement, and by his ardent surrender of self to the sensuous as well as to the godlike. But,” adds the German critic, and here he lays his finger on the essential difference between the art and character of the men compared, “sensuousness in Mantegna was neither ignored nor emphasised,” for there was no pandering to the love of sensation in the work of the sincere and earnest master of Mantua, who never represented passion for its own sake, but combined with a true appreciation of the beauty of physical form and the poetry of motion a stern severity of expression peculiarly his own. Both masters pursued the same ideal of beauty, both penetrated to the very heart of their subjects, but the paintings of Mantegna are more elevated in spirit than those of the more widely admired successor, whose forerunner he is said to have been.
There is, it must be admitted, a certain want of dramatic unity marring the effect even of the greatest compositions of the Mantuan painter; but it should not be forgotten that his aim was not the same as that of Raphael, Titian, Holbein, or Memlinc. Even his severest critics are compelled to admit that he fully realised his own ambition, a truly worthy one, to bring the past into touch with the present, and to pave the way for those who should come after him. His best works display not only consummate draughtsmanship but a power of interpreting intellectual and spiritual emotion, rare amongst his contemporaries, though it was to be bestowed in fullest measure upon many of the masters of the sixteenth century; and he will ever remain, in the opinion of those most competent to judge, one of the greatest of their predecessors.
The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh