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Andrea Mantegna 1431 - 1506

Kevin J. Benoy

Andrea Mantegna

• Mantegna is often seen as the most important painter of the early Renaissance after Masaccio.

Andrea Mantegna • He was adopted at 10 years of age by the painter Francesco Squarcione. • He became an established master of his own workshop at age 17. • He was determined not to allow his adopted father to continue profiting from his talent. • The two fought many legal battles. Virgin & Child by Squarcione

Andrea Mantegna • Like Squarcione, Mantegna loved classical antiquities. • His paintings consciously integrated antique forms. • He helped spark general public interest in the ancient Roman world. St. Sebastian

Andrea Mantegna • In 1459 he moved to Mantua, where he worked for the Gonzaga family. • They were great patrons of art and this guaranteed a steady income for the rest of his life. • However, they were not particularly attractive subjects to paint.

Andrea Mantegna • His “Camera degli Sposi” (Wedding Chamber) involved the painting of walls and ceilings to create the illusion of an open-air pavilion. This room foreshadowed later baroque interest in illusory work – more than a century before it became common.

Andrea Mantegna • The painted occulus contained a joke that must have amused his sponsor no end. • Diaperless cherubim perch precariously around its rim, while a tenuously balanced painted planter looks likely to fall on whoever stands beneath it.

Andrea Mantegna • His frescoes in Padua, at the Church of the Eremitani, were lost forever – destroyed in a war-time explosion in 1944. • They no exist only in reproductions and in a surviving preliminary sketch – the earliest such study we know of. • It proves that, like Masaccio, Mantegna sketched the nude form first, adding clothes later.

Nude preliminary study St. James on his way to execution.

Andrea Mantegna • Mantegna took a keen interest in the new technique of mathematical perspective. • His Dead Christ shocked viewers with its brutal realism, achieved by foreshortening.

Andrea Mantegna • Mantegna was fascinated by the possibilities that perspective offered. • He employed the socalled “worm’s eye” perspective to give an unusual viewpoint in many of his works.

Andrea Mantegna • He also employed an interesting diagonal composition in the traditional Virgin & Child image. • It is precisely this drive to innovate which makes him an important Renaissance painter.

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