Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

During the flowering of Urbino, the cities of northern Italy had matured as artistic

centers, and this lecture takes us to Padua and Mantua.

The expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494, followed by the turmoil surrounding

the charismatic preacher reformer Savonarola, resulted in some displacement of artistic

development to other cities.

Rome drew great artists for specific great papal commissions, as we've seen, but no Roman

school of artists emerged from their activity.

Cities in the north of Italy had become increasingly important, innovative centers of art.

Andrea Mantegna, who was born about 1430-31 and lived until 156, is one of the most individualistic

artists of the late Quattrocento.

He was born near Padua and apprenticed there until 1448.

Naturally, he adopted certain elements of the established Paduan style, including, for instance,

the device of decorative swags or garlands of fruit and flowers.

The distinctive qualities of color and stylization of Venetian and Byzantine art, amidst which he

grew up, affected him strongly.

But so, too, did the innovations of the Florentine Renaissance.

The strongest influence upon him was probably that of Donatello, then at work in Padua in

San Antonio.

The great bronze reliefs on the high altar, which we have seen, with their compelling

illusion of pictorial space, inspired Mantegna to master perspective and foreshortening.

He was an avid archaeologist with a lifelong passion for classical antiquity, a passion that

must have been stimulated by the scholars of Padua's already famous university, where

classical antiquity had long been studied.

Mantegna's active involvement with the large numbers of Roman remains, architectural and

sculptural, that were being unearthed in northern Italy, accounts to a considerable degree

for the notably tactile surfaces of everything that he painted.

Since Mantegna's apprenticeship in Padua lasted from about 1440 until 1448, he may well have

known Donatello, whose decade working in and near the shrine of San Antonio was drawing

to a close in 1453.

That was at just the moment when Mantegna received his first great commission.

He had been part of a team of young painters, assisting the Venetian artists Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni

D'Alemagna, and the Paduan artist Niccolò Pizzolo, not a name to conjure with, in the decoration

of an important chapel, the Ovetari Chapel, in the church of the Eremitani in Padua.

Since the name of the church is unusual, it may interest you to know that Eremitani means

hermits, but that here it refers to an order of Augustinian friars, originally a congregation

of hermits, who by the Renaissance had forsaken the contemplative for the active life, although

they remained rather austere.

Many of the painters working on the Ovetari Chapel decoration had died or withdrawn from

the project, and suddenly Mantegna found himself entrusted to finish the rest of the fresco

cycle, which he did between 1454 and 1457.

The principal remaining subjects—there had been work finished, of course—but the principal

remaining subjects were four scenes from the life of St. James, culminating in the execution

of St. James.

In their brilliant use of perspective, these frescoes reflect the artist's close study

of Donatello's reliefs on the Santo High Altar.

The image you're looking at, St. James led to execution, depicts a specific moment as the

saint is led to the place where he will be decapitated.

According to the Golden Legend, along the road there lay a paralyzed man who called out to

James, begging him to cure him.

James said to him, In the name of Jesus Christ, for whose faith I am led to execution, stand

up cured and bless your Creator.

The man stood up and blessed the Lord.

Perhaps Mantegna imagined that the man had in fact been lying by the road and had already

begun to rise.

I suggest it, because the Roman soldier appears to raise his hand in surprise.

Here is the paralyzed man below, the formerly paralyzed man, or perhaps the soldier is merely objecting

to James' intervention.

St. James stands here.

In any case, his hand, that of the soldier, is an effective foil or counterpart to that of

James.

This is very nice, this play of open palms across that empty space above the head of the

man to be cured.

This is remarkable, for its command of foreshortening and perspective, as well as for its archeologically

convincing Roman arch, decorated with sculptural reliefs.

The saint and the other figures are also sculptural.

The lines and planes of their faces carved by the brush, as it were.

A close-up of the face of St. James looks virtually like a painted sculpture.

Because the bottom of the fresco was slightly above eye level, if you were standing in the

chapel, that is, the bottom of the fresco was slightly above eye level, Mantegna painted

the figures as seen from that viewpoint.

The principal figures of the saint, the soldier, and the cripple are placed at the front edge of

the scene, where they can be viewed whole entire, while other figures, placed further back, are

cropped below the ankles, here, for instance, in the center, as the receding space seems to

tilt downwards and downwards and backwards.

A command of perspective, however, does not mean that the perspective system is consistent.

On the contrary, artistic command and control of perspective means mediating between the desire

for illusionistic recreation of reality and the demands of the reality of the flat painted surface.

For example, here, the architecture in this fresco should also be drawn with lines that converge

as the structures rise, that is to say, the triumphal arch.

The lines should be converging, but that would create the impression that the buildings were

tipping back into the space.

And it would severely compromise the visual stability of the wall surface, indeed, of the

whole chapel.

So Mantegna, as Masaccio and others had done before him, compromised the system for the

sake of pictorial cohesion.

That the image we have been studying is, as you, of course, noticed, an old black and

white photograph, is the consequence of the disastrous, accidental bombing of the church

by a U.S. war plane in 1944, which destroyed the Ovatare Chapel, together with most of the

east end of the church.

A valiant attempt was made to reconstruct the frescoes from the flakes of painted plaster

buried in the debris.

One earlier fresco had been removed at an earlier time because of its bad condition and

wasn't in the church anymore.

And so it, in an already poor condition, survived the bombing.

Mantegna's great Paduan achievement was this fresco cycle in the Eremitani.

And old photos show us what we lost.

The result of the bombing could have been worse, art historically speaking, since the

arena chapel with Giotto's masterpiece stands only a few hundred yards beyond the Eremitani.

While engaged on the Eremitani frescoes, Mantegna received a major commission for an altarpiece.

It was for the high altar of the imposing Romanesque church of San Zeno in nearby Verona, whose abbot

was a member of the aristocratic Correr family of Venice.

This vast basilica terminates in the east with a raised sanctuary above the crypt, creating a prominent stage for the painting.

The San Zeno altarpiece, finished in 1459, appears at first glance to be a conventional triptych, as you see.

But the sumptuous classical frame was conceived as a sort of real portico, an entrance opening into the unified painted space behind it,

where there is a courtyard defined by stone pillars carrying an architrave.

Here are the pillars, here are the architrave, with the carved figures upon it, beyond which, by the way, if you look through the pillars behind, you can see the sky, white crystalline clouds floating in a blue sky beyond.

The space, this courtyard that he has painted behind the real columns of the altarpiece, is inhabited by the enthroned Madonna and Child in the center, together with child, angel musicians, very charming figures around her.

And flanked on either side in their own, as it were, column space, but again part of a continuous space behind those columns of the altarpiece,

you have four saints on each side, four left and four right.

And those figures are arranged intelligibly in the space.

Prominent ornamental swags, I mentioned them, the Paduan idea or decorative device of hanging swags of flowers and fruits.

You see them here in the foreground, painted as though hanging across from the very edge of the room.

These were already part of the Paduan tradition.

You find them constantly in Paduan art, and they are painted here at the top of the painting.

The monumentality and the spatial illusion of the Eremitani frescoes is also found here.

Let me show you a detail with the central section.

A striking foreshortening of the marble pavement in these frescoes.

A very, it's a very, very shallow, shallow floor space.

The Madonna and Child monumentally seated upon, monumentally seated and raised above the ground level.

Here you see the clouds and sky and even a touch of landscape better in the distance behind.

And you also see behind the head of the Madonna, just above the head of the Madonna, the frieze, which has a gilded background and seems to be a sculptured frieze with putti, putti on it.

A wonderful change of different kinds of reality. You have real columns here in the foreground in this detail, the real columns of the altarpiece itself.

Behind that you have painted columns that seem to extend from them.

The painted swags seem to be very real, right in front of your eye and almost part of the altar frame itself.

And then the space, the frieze behind that, the Madonna and angels within that, and then the space beyond into the landscape.

It's very complex and very skillful arrangement spatially.

On the left-hand side you have equal, equally successful perspective recession.

Here you see clearly the tiles, but you're seeing them, your viewpoint is so low, you see it's virtually down at knee level or below here, just above their feet.

So we're just seeing the tops of those tiles and yet he's able to lay them out according to the rules of perspective.

The color in Mantegna is striking, strong colors, the strong yellow and red of St. Peter in the foreground here.

We have St. Peter next to him, St. Paul with his sword, and then we have the figure of John the Evangelist,

and finally the bishop in the background is St. Zeno.

The skillful arrangements of these saints in perspective recession, the monumentality, sculptural monumentality of the figures,

and the striking color all aid in the total strong effect of this piece, which carries the length of the church.

It's remarkable what strength it has visually to carry down a huge space.

Here's the whole altar piece again. In fact, this time you see the front of the altar table below.

This is the altar itself where the mass, where the host would be placed.

And I'm going to call your attention in a moment to the three predella panels, the footer panels here below the main scene.

But I will point before turning to them to the fact that if the host, if the Eucharist were placed here,

the crucifixion would be directly above it, and of course the Madonna and Child directly above that.

Again, the emphasis on the body of Christ on the Corpus Christi that we have seen elsewhere.

And by the way, this altar piece with its saints gathered around the Madonna in a single coherent space is another example of the sacred conversation,

the Sacra Conversazione type, which we have seen before in examples by, among others, Filippo Lippi and Domenico Veneziano.

The three predella panels are unusually large. They're about three feet wide.

And they may have been directly inspired by Donatello's only slightly larger reliefs on the high altar of the Santo in Padua.

Two of them, two of these predella panels, have been separated from the altarpiece and are in museums,

but have been replaced in the church by copies. So you have all three, but only one of them original.

The one I'm going to show you now is in fact today in the Louvre. So what you see on the altar is a copy, and that is the crucifixion.

It was the center panel, and it is wonderfully bold in color, very precise in drawing, and spatially expansive,

both in terms of a distant landscape with these wonderful rocky mountains above, and the sky.

Again, it becomes very typical for Mantegna. His clouds have a sculptural quality to them as well.

As brilliant and airy as the sky is, it is also a very structural sky.

The body of Christ is modeled like a piece of sculpture, just to take one figure in the painting.

And since the top of the cross, where the plaque with INRI, the Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, which was mockingly placed there,

where that plaque is, nearly touches the top of the frame.

It gives the effect that the crucified figure is not only isolated against the sky, but pressed dramatically close to us.

You see at the base of the cross, we see how far back it sits from the front of the painting.

But there's something contradictory that happens in perspective when you run this right up to the top.

Associated with the edge of the painting, with the frame as it were, it pulls it forward visually.

That together with the sculptural quality of the body makes it very, very immediate.

A very great Venetian painter, Tintoretto, would perhaps borrowing from this, perhaps reinventing it,

do something very similar in a work of his later on.

Another of the Padella panels, in San Zeno, showed the Christ on the Mount of Olives, with the Apostles sleeping below.

Well, just after he did that altarpiece, he painted a slightly smaller independent version of the subject.

So what I'm showing you now is not from the altarpiece, but a separate related piece that he did.

Christ on the Mount of Olives, the agony in the garden, as it is often called.

A painting of about 1460, this in London, in the National Gallery.

It is a powerfully expressive work.

This event, which I think we haven't seen before, followed the Last Supper.

Jesus, accompanied by Peter, John the Evangelist, and John's brother James,

went to the Garden of Gethsemane at the Mount of Olives.

Gethsemane, by the way, signifies oil press in Hebrew.

The garden was on the east side of Jerusalem.

Asking them to wait and watch for him, asking his apostles to wait and watch,

he drew a little apart from them to pray for release from the coming events.

Now, agony, as we use it in this title in English, is probably poorly chosen,

because it's easily misunderstood.

It comes from the Greek word agon, meaning contest.

As when we say we made an agonizing choice, that's closer to the meaning here,

because it signifies the struggle between the human nature of Jesus,

which feared suffering, and the divine nature that accepted it.

So that's the sense in which it's the agony in the garden.

It's expressed in the words,

Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me.

Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.

Montaigne's painting features an extensive landscape, but one dominated by rocks.

The apostles, all too fallible in their human nature, have fallen asleep,

stretched out in sleep on the barren ground.

Christ kneels in prayer on a rocky platform in front of him,

with a kind of buildup of rocks to the left of him,

which looks almost like an altar or an altar table.

Above the background city, which is understood to be Jerusalem,

two conical mountains rise.

In the middle distance, we have a procession of soldiers led by Judas to find their quarry.

All of this unyielding stone underlies the implacable progress of the narrative of Christ's passion.

Mantua is not far from Padua,

and it was there that Mantegna moved in 1460 at the invitation of Ludovico Gonzaga.

This map of the late 16th century gives you a pretty good idea of the city's layout,

rather unattractively situated in a swampy plain near three lakes.

Easy to defend, however, but not pleasant to live in necessarily.

They always had, the court at Mantua always had to import their artists,

but the Gonzaga family had cultural pretensions,

and they importuned many talented painters, architects, composers, and writers to grace their court.

And Mantua, in ancient times, had been the birthplace of the Roman poet Virgil.

Mantegna would remain in Mantua for the rest of his life, that's 46 years, as court painter to the Gonzaga family.

In his first decade at the Mantuan court, Mantegna painted portraits, small paintings, some frescoes for a chapel,

tapestry designs, and decorative work of that sort, which was quite typical for a court artist.

I want to show you a famous and startling painting, The Dead Christ, now in the Brera.

Powerful, undocumented in a sense, and there's no consensus on its date.

It's been dated as early as 1466 and as late as 1500.

The latter, because it was in his possession when Mantegna died in 156.

But since many artists have retained their work for personal reasons, I don't think that's enough reason to date it late.

On the other hand, the rather softer, gentler modeling of the figure suggests a stylistic change

that is apparent in the frescoes in the Ducal Palace in Mantua, which we will shortly see.

This question, we haven't talked too much about chronology and dating problems,

but the question's well worth considering since it directly affects our understanding of Mantegna's stylistic development.

Here, I'm using a recent dating which has been suggested of about 1470 to 74.

And by the way, it's been correctly observed that the two mourning heads, the two heads that push in at the left, are unconvincing.

They're crowded into the space. Their faces are too harshly linear in comparison with the figure of Christ.

They distract rather than enhance. They distract from the effect of the painting.

And I think they may well have been added posthumously.

You can judge for yourself. Block them out with your hand and see if you think it improves the effect of the painting.

But the startling foreshortening of this painting, which forces us, as it were, into a kneeling position at the feet of the dead Christ,

is emotionally potent, and it was an invention borrowed by later artists looking for a similar effect.

During the 1460s, Mantegna also made his first trips to Florence, where he saw Benozzo Gozzoli's chapel in the Medici Palace,

and to Pisa. And apparently this trip, these trips were done as a study and preparation, in preparation,

for the decoration of a room in the Ducal Palace, the room we know as the Camera degli Sposi,

the room of the bride and groom is the only translation.

This is Mantegna's most famous work in Mantua. It is a trompe l'oeil fresco,

an illusionistic decoration in a wing of the Ducal Palace. And when it was finished,

it had no equal in the field of illusionistic painting in an architectural setting.

Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, reported that the frescoes made the visiting Duke of Urbino

stop in stupefaction, and they remained a powerful influence on artists for centuries after that.

Probably begun in 1471 and completed in 1474, this room is one of the triumphs of Renaissance painted ensembles.

It's charming, it's dignified, it's perfect in scale, it's compelling in the many portraits of the court that are included in it,

and it represented a new level of achievement in trompe l'oeil effects and in spatial illusionism.

The name, by the way, the Camera degli Sposi, the room of the bride and groom,

it was given only by a 17th century writer, probably on his misunderstanding of a large inscription over the doorway,

which trumpets the names of Ludovico and his wife Barbara.

The room was not in honor of their wedding, as he may have thought.

In any event, by contemporaries, it was known simply as the Camera Picta, the painted room,

and it was used by the court for banquets and entertainments.

As you look at it, and these are the two basic painted walls, two principal scenes on adjacent walls,

the larger is the one to the right, the extraordinary group portrait of the family of Ludovico III, Gonzaga,

in which the artist incorporates the large fireplace on that wall as a sort of podium,

upon which the Duke and Duchess sit, surrounded by their attendants and family,

while others mount a staircase to join them on top of the mantelpiece.

And I'll show you this in a moment, but let me show you the left-hand side here for just a moment.

We'll be looking later at this fresco, which is the Cardinal Gonzaga returning home on the left-hand side,

and some scenes which are essentially related to the hunt and the countryside, beautiful landscape area.

I should point out that Duke Ludovico, the Duchess, who was a Brandenburg, by the way, Barbara Brandenburg,

their children, the dwarf, etc., are to be found here.

We're looking at, here's the Duchess seated, the Duke talking to an advisor.

At this point, three of the Duchess's children, two young and the older, much older boy standing behind.

A dwarf, right here. This court, like many European courts, had dwarfs, dwarves,

and here is a small woman at this point.

The conjunction of real and painted architecture.

This young man stands in front of an illusionistic pilaster.

This is painted, and yet this corbel, which comes down from the vault, this is real architecture.

So real architecture, comes down to here, is continued in fictive architecture,

in front of which, obviously, this illusionistic young man stands.

Curtains are pulled back, and a curtain rod is used all the way across to enhance that illusionistic effect.

And on the right-hand side, people ascend the steps and are welcomed into the courtyard.

There is a certain similarity in noble dignity to the Piero della Francesca scenes of Solomon and Sheba at Arezzo,

which Mantegna surely knew. But his aristocrats, Mantegna's, are more approachable, more relaxed,

as befits real people in their own palace.

Here is the arrival of the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga.

The smaller fresco depicts the meeting of Ludovico on the left now, standing here, who we've just seen seated,

and he is meeting his son Cardinal Francesco, who was elevated to that position in 1461 by Pope Pius XII.

They are on a shallow terrace, which opens onto an extensive landscape quite different from the marshes of Mantua.

It has fertile fields near in, close to us, and with a walled city behind, and much classical sculpture and architecture.

Cardinal Francesco had returned from Rome to visit Mantua in 1471 for the groundbreaking of the great basilica of San Andrea,

designed by Alberti for the city of Mantua, and this scene may allude to that occasion.

The architecture in the landscape, by the way, makes numerous allusions to the city of Rome.

And in the center of the vault of this room is a painted oculus,

an illusionistic opening to the sky, surrounded by a parapet over which adult women peer at us,

while Amoretti both look over and stand in front of the parapet, painted in the sharpest possible foreshortening.

This foreshortening, called di sotto in su, meaning from below up or below upwards,

is the earliest important Renaissance example of extreme illusionism on a ceiling painting.

And though modest in size, it became the prototype and inspiration for three centuries of such decoration.

There is at least one thing you ought not to miss.

There is a board or a pole across this part of the open oculus,

and a huge, we'd say potted plant, I suppose, a great tub here, is balanced on that,

giving a rather tentative feeling.

Should the pole be removed, the plant will come tumbling into our space.

But all of this, of course, is simply flat, one flat painted surface.

Mantegna naturally painted individual works, many of them, for specific patrons.

And at the Mantuan court, other members of the Gonzaga family employed him during his long years there.

Late in the century, the remarkable Isabella d'Este, wife of Francesco Gonzaga,

commissioned Mantegna, among others, for paintings to adorn her studiolo,

which housed her collection of precious objects and therefore differed from the studiolo in Urbino,

which was principally a library and place of study.

In that room is this, or was this painting, it is now in the Louvre, this painting by Mantegna.

It is Pallas Athena expelling the vices from the Garden of Virtue,

and was painted around 1500-152.

Isabella d'Este was a learned woman and an art-loving woman,

and she commissioned Mantegna for two paintings for this room.

She called this, I didn't call it a studiolo, she called it a grotta, a cave.

This was in the castle of St. George, near the main castle, and where she kept her collection.

One of these paintings, this one, Pallas Athena expelling the vices, is an unusual allegory

because it stresses the woman, the role of a woman, pardon me, in protecting the realm of virtue in her highly cultivated domain.

To be sure, she's a goddess, but surely Pallas Athena is intended as a surrogate for the Duchess in this case.

Lust stands just to the right of center, this mostly nude female, on the back of a centaur,

and she seems heedless of the charge of Athena, far left, and her female attendants,

who are going to expel lust and all of the other vices, which are spread off to the right.

Well, allegories, whether they're by Botticelli or by Mantegna, can be troublesome for modern taste,

but they are important barometers of the intellectual climate of a particular court or culture.

And fortunately, very fortunately, they have their beauties beyond their symbolic complexities.

Mantegna's late style is sometimes criticized for dryness,

but the unflinching intensity of this Christ seated on a sarcophagus, supported by two angels,

painted in the 1490s, I would think as late as 1500, is the epitome of a late masterpiece.

All superfluous elements are eliminated.

There is nonetheless in this painting a backward-looking character.

I think that's undeniable.

The painting has, for instance, the awesome immediacy of a Byzantine mosaic of the Pantocrator,

the figure of Christ in heaven, ruling earth.

It's not known for whom this painting was made.

It's now in Copenhagen.

But one wonders if the fact that Mantua possessed a famous relic

that attracted many pilgrims, a drop of Christ's blood that had been saved by Longinus,

who was the centurion at the crucifixion, influenced the presentation of this subject.

Perhaps.

I grant you that the wounds of Christ are notably bloodless,

but they are certainly starkly presented to our view.

A beautiful landscape extends behind it, rocky in Mantegna's manner, but very expressive.

Andrea Mantegna is not quite like any other artist in the Renaissance.

At least, I think he is not.

His special blend of intellect, archaeology, command of the vocabulary of perspective,

and his narrative and symbolic intensity are, generally speaking, easily recognizable.

He is not easily forgotten, and his influence was very long-lasting.

Thank you.