Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna (c.  1431–1506) was a central figure in north Italian painting in the second half of the 1400s: his influential manner is characterized by an experimental approach to perspective illusionism and its evocation of the gravity as well as the materiality of Roman statuary and relief. Born the son of a woodworker in Isola di Carturo, near Padua, he joined the workshop of Francesco Squarcione before he was in his teens. By 1445, when he matriculated in the painter’s guild of Padua, Mantegna had been adopted by his teacher—an arrangement from which the artist sought emancipation in 1449. He was already receiving lucrative commissions of his own; an altarpiece for S. Sofia in 1448, murals and a terracotta altarpiece for a chapel in the church of the Eremitani the same year, a portrait of the marchese of Ferrara Leonello d’Este and his favorite Folco da Villafora in 1449. His painterly evocations of antique sculpture, epigraphy, and monumental architecture gave visual expression to the cultural identity of Padua, a university town highly conscious of its Roman (and legendary pre-Roman) heritage. Mantegna received more literary celebration than any other artist before Raphael, including comparisons to Virgil and Livy unprecedented for painters. After prestigious commissions for Padua, Ferrara, Verona, and as far afield as Montepeloso (Irsina) in Basilicata, in 1457 he was offered the position of court painter by Ludovico Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, and moved there with his wife, Niccolosia Bellini (from the famous family of Venetian painters) in January 1459. In over four decades of Gonzaga service he produced a spectacular series of monumental murals, devotional paintings, portraits, and mythological works, while also designing (if not executing) a series of master engravings. A painting of St. Sebastian was dispatched to Aigueperse (Auvergne) in 1481. In 1488 he traveled to Rome to execute a chapel in the Vatican Belvedere for Pope Innocent VIII, demolished in 1780. In Mantua he lived as a courtier and entrepreneur, dealing in real estate and in textiles, and collecting antiquities, but he appears to have ended his days in financial difficulties. Mantegna was admired by Dürer, Raphael, Rubens, Poussin, and Degas, and in more recent times inspired works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kehinde Wiley, and William Kentridge. His recognition as a great modern painter persisted in Northern Italy and his prints spread his fame throughout Europe, while his reputation has survived Vasari’s begrudging but influential biography (1550, 1568) which reported that Squarcione and fellow artists had derided his “stony” manner, the tendency of his figures to emulate marble statuary rather than living flesh. A series of exhibitions in recent decades have brought about a re-evaluation and new appreciation of the artist and his broad impact.