MANSURA, the capital of the province of Dakahlia, Lower Egypt, near the west side of Lake Menzala, and on the Cairo-Damietta railway. Pop. (1907), 40,279. It dates from 1221, and is famous as the scene of the battle of Mansura, fought on the 8th of February 1250, between the crusaders commanded by the king of France, St Louis, and the Egyptians. The battle was drawn, but it led to the retreat of the crusaders on Damietta, and to the surrender of St Louis. Mansura has several cotton-ginning, cotton, linen and sail-cloth factories.
MANT, RICHARD (1776-1848), English divine, was born at Southampton on the 12th of February 1776, and was educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford. He was elected fellow of Oriel in 1798, and after taking orders held a curacy at Southampton (1802), and then the vicarage of Coggeshall, Essex (1810). In 1811 he was Bampton lecturer, in 1816 was made rector of St Botolph’s, and in 1820 bishop of Killaloe and Kilfenoragh (Ireland). In 1823 he was translated to Down and Connor, to which Dromore was added in 1842. In connexion with the Rev. George D’Oyly he wrote a commentary on the whole Bible. Other works by him were the Psalms in an English Metrical Version (1842) and a History of the Church of Ireland (1839-1841; 2 vols.).
MANTEGAZZA, PAOLO (1831-1910), Italian physiologist and anthropologist, was born at Monza on the 31st of October 1831. After spending his student-days at the universities of Pisa and Milan, he gained his M.D. degree at Pavia in 1854. After travelling in Europe, India and America, he practised as a doctor in the Argentine Republic and Paraguay. Returning to Italy in 1858 he was appointed surgeon at Milan Hospital and professor of general pathology at Pavia. In 1870 he was nominated professor of anthropology at the Instituto di Studii Superiori, Florence. Here he founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, and later the Italian Anthropological Society. From 1865 to 1876 he was deputy for Monza in the Italian parliament, subsequently being elected to the senate. He became the object of bitter attacks on the ground of the extent to which he carried the practice of vivisection. His published works include Fisiologia del dolore (1880); Fisiologia dell’ amore (1896); Elementi d’ igiene (1875); Fisonomia e mimica (1883); Le Estasi umane (1887).
MANTEGNA, ANDREA (1431-1506), one of the chief heroes in the advance of painting in Italy, was born in Vicenza, of very humble parentage. It is said that in his earliest boyhood Andrea was, like Giotto, put to shepherding or cattle-herding; this is not likely, and can at any rate have lasted only a very short while, as his natural genius for art developed with singular precocity, and excited the attention of Francesco Squarcione, who entered him in the gild of painters before he had completed his eleventh year.
Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a proportionate faculty for acting, with profit to himself and others, as a sort of artistic middleman; his own performances as a painter were merely mediocre. He travelled in Italy, and perhaps in Greece also, collecting antique statues, reliefs, vases, &c., forming the largest collection then extant of such works, making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others to study from, and then undertaking works on commission for which his pupils no less than himself were made available. As many as one hundred and thirty-seven painters and pictorial students passed through his school, established towards 1440, which became famous all over Italy. Mantegna was, as he deserved to be, Squarcione’s favourite pupil. Squarcione adopted him as his son, and purposed making him the heir of his fortune. Andrea was only seventeen when he painted, in the church of S. Sofia in Padua, a Madonna picture of exceptional and recognized excellence. He was no doubt fully aware of having achieved no common feat, as he marked the work with his name and the date, and the years of his age. This painting was destroyed in the 17th century.
As the youth progressed in his studies, he came under the influence of Jacopo Bellini, a painter considerably superior to Squarcione, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni and Gentile, and of a daughter Nicolosia; and in 1454 Jacopo gave Nicolosia to Andrea in marriage. This connexion of Andrea with the pictorial rival of Squarcione is generally assigned as the reason why the latter became alienated from the son of his adoption, and always afterwards hostile to him. Another suggestion, which rests, however, merely on its own internal probability, is that Squarcione had at the outset used his pupil Andrea as the unavowed executant of certain commissions, but that after a while Andrea began painting on his own account, thus injuring the professional interests of his chief. The remarkably definite and original style formed by Mantegna may be traced out as founded on the study of the antique in Squarcione’s atelier, followed by a diligent application of principles of work exemplified by Paolo Uccello and Donatello, with the practical guidance and example of Jacopo Bellini in the sequel.