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Author: Joseph Manca

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ISBN : 978-1-78310-754-4

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Joseph Manca

Andrea Mantegna

and the Italian Renaissance

Contents

Mantegna as Artistic Revolutionary

The Debut of a Prodigy: Mantegna’s Early years in Padua

Mantegna as Court Painter in Mantua

Piety and Passion in Mantegna’s Later Religious Works

The “Triumphs of Caesar” and Other Visions of Antiquity

Mantegna and the Art of Printmaking

Patroness and Painter: The “Studiolo” of Isabella d’Este

Mantegna’s Place in History

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Notes

1. The Holy Family with St Elizabeth and the young St John, c. 1485-1488.

Tempera and gold on canvas, 62.9 x 51.3 cm.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Mantegna as Artistic Revolutionary

The art of Andrea Mantegna (born c.1431, died 1506) has long maintained a broad and deep appeal. From the impressive illusionism of his earliest works (Fig. 4) to the narrative power of his mature paintings (Fig. 2), Mantegna’s art remained vivid and heroic, dramatic and emotional. They are also painted in stunning detail: pebbles, blades of grass, veins, and hair are rendered with excruciating care, and he depicted even in his great narrative works the mundane particulars of earthly existence, showing laundry hanging out to dry and buildings fallen into disrepair. He had a deep interest in human nature and issues of moral character. Perhaps most strikingly, Mantegna’s pictures are filled with references to classical antiquity. No other painter of the fifteenth century so thoroughly understood and abundantly included in his art the costumes, drapery folds, inscriptions, architecture, subject matter, ethical attitude, and other aspects of ancient classical civilisation. And instead of the cool classicism of later centuries, his vision of Greco-Roman civilisation is lively and has a familiar and nostalgic air about it. For him, antiquity was a near, palpable presence, one which he sought constantly to bring to colourful existence in his pictures. It is this thirst for a vanished classical past that places Mantegna most firmly in the context of his time, as his art was favoured most warmly by Renaissance contemporaries who shared his visionary quest to revive the moral strength and naturalism which marked the art of antiquity.

Mantegna was a leader in the renewal of culture occurring during his time, a movement we call the Renaissance, or “rebirth.” In the fifteenth century, classical civilisation was a whole universe open to rediscovery. It offered an alternative to the confining, medieval world of scholastic thought and Christian theology. Classicism meant the liberation of the mind and the joys of literary study. The writers and artists of antiquity indulged freely in the delights of the material world, an attitude shared by Mantegna and many of his contemporaries. Renaissance men found spiritual ancestors from centuries past who had similar ideas about virtue and vice, and whose secular sensibility embraced a naturalistic art that was idealised in its formal perfection and its harmonious proportions. Mantegna painted his classical visions for enthusiasts, men and women who were dilettantes in the original sense of the word, delighting in their new discoveries. His life and works contributed to the air of celebration and self-congratulation characterising much of Renaissance culture. Some modern scholars avoid using the word “Renaissance” and, rather than see the period as being an age of confidence and a glorious rebirth of values, they describe Italian culture from 1400 to 1600 as one of conflicting interests, a hesitant and contradictory world in which the men and women cautiously “negotiated” their places in society. Period texts, however, reveal a mentality not as tentative and fearful as modern scholarship would have us believe. To be sure, the Renaissance had its political crises and social dislocations. It is important to bear in mind the larger picture: leading patrons, intellectuals, and artists in Italy felt they were living in a period of rebirth, and were forcibly helping to shape a new order of things. In the visual sphere, Renaissance writers about art – Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, and Giorgio Vasari, for example – were quite clear in seeing the Middle Ages as a dark period, and their own age as one of enlightenment and human improvement. They looked back with admiration towards the achievement of the Greeks and Romans, and called for, not a bland imitation of antiquity, but an embracing of the ideals and values which made ancient societies superior to the cultural decline that followed: reason, an acceptance of natural law, and ethical moderation.

2. The Descent into Limbo, c. 1490.

Tempera on panel, 38.2 x 42.3 cm. Private collection.

The rebirth of the art of painting was one of the major aspects of the Renaissance period. Mantegna’s pictures – embracing a vivid realism and a learned antiquarianism – epitomised the art of the Early Renaissance period perhaps better than the works of any other artist of the fifteenth century. This is an extraordinary claim to make for a painter who was born, trained, and lived in the relatively provincial cities of Padua and Mantua, removed from the flourishing cultural centres of Florence, Venice, and Rome. But somehow Mantegna managed to seize on the avant-garde intellectual ideas of his time and forge a style which set him apart from his contemporaries. His greatest achievement was that he did not accommodate medieval tradition in his art; he fought against it. The older Gothic painters, active in the early fifteenth century, clung to the dreamy, soft, gentle vision we associate with the late medieval world. Moreover, many of the so-called Renaissance painters of the fifteenth century chose not to eradicate this idyllic and elegant tradition. Painters such as Fra Angelico, Alessandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, and even Leonardo da Vinci continued to incorporate some of the elegant and decorative aspects of the Gothic manner in their artistry. But Mantegna confronted the medieval style, and he set out already at an early age to destroy an older tradition and create a new one. Soft surfaces and languorous movement gave way to sharp definition and virile action.

Mantegna had other painters in his camp who were revolutionaries, some of whom preceded him. Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Andrea del Castagno are among the central Italian artists who first turned to a new tough and monumental style. These painters also reacted against the sweet Gothic manner, and Mantegna was greatly indebted to several older masters for blazing a trail. Yet, Mantegna was more thoroughly engaged than any previous painter of the Quattrocento (1400s) in archaeological study and a conscious revival of Greco-Roman civilisation. The result of this historical attitude made Mantegna’s art striking for his contemporaries, as it is for us. Mantegna neglected no detail in his art, and his works are based on intense and enthusiastic study. The young painter from Padua created a manner which epitomised the Early Renaissance, combining a plausible realism and cogent narrative style with a thoughtful attempt to re-create the visual world of antiquity. His special achievement as an antiquarian-painter was recognised by many observers, including Giovanni Santi, the father of the painter Raphael, who said observantly of Mantegna: “No man ever took or used the brush or other pencil, who was a clear successor of ancient times, as he is, with such truth.”[1]

3. Sandro Botticelli, St Augustine in his Cell, 1494.

Tempera on panel, 41 x 27 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Why was Mantegna among the revolutionaries of his time, so intent on establishing a new artistic vision? For many Renaissance artists it would be difficult to guess the origins of their style, because we lack sufficient biographical information or documentation. Yet, we do know a great deal about Mantegna’s personality, artistic training, and social relations; it is possible to hypothesise why Mantegna’s art looks the way it does. For example, it is telling that he was known to have been argumentative, territorial, and sometimes cruel; surely the stony, incisive, and at times violent world he created as an artist is appropriate for one with such a temperament. It is difficult to imagine Mantegna having embraced the languid narrative and sweet lyricism that remained in vogue throughout the fifteenth century in many quarters. On the whole, both his personality and his art were hard-edged and aggressive. Renaissance viewers who wanted prettier, less detailed, or less historical pictures could have found them elsewhere, and there were surely many who disliked Mantegna’s art. He was not interested in painting slender angels with pink cheeks, long blonde hair, and pious, vapid expressions. His art is rarely charming, and those who favoured the suave elegance of Alessandro Botticelli or the gentle piety of Pietro Perugino perhaps found little to enjoy in Mantegna. Nor did he, like some of the painters in the northern Italian court at Ferrara, establish an extravagant and self-conscious manner; his paintings are more straightforward and naturalistic than that. Avoiding both the pedestrian naturalism of a Domenico Ghirlandaio and the sweet or fantastic style, Mantegna – strong willed and tough minded – developed a manner based on incisive narrative and classical revivalism.

It is also clear from the beginning that Mantegna was an intellectual artist, if not in an academic way at least in the sense that he was curious about literary as well as visual ideas. He associated with scholars and other writers, and the results appear in his poetic and well researched art. Indeed, he was drawn to words during his whole lifetime, enjoying the study of Roman inscriptions and depicting Greek and Hebrew lettering in his works. His timely art found a ready following in Quattrocento Italy, and he drew support from contemporaries who favoured the revival of classical culture. Importantly, he had a ready affinity for allegory and historical accounts, and was able to follow literary programs and illustrate stories successfully, avoiding the awkwardness plaguing many Renaissance artists who based their art on detailed verbal programs. Mantegna bridged the gap between the written and the pictorial worlds.

4. St Mark, c. 1448-1449.

Casein on canvas, 82 x 63.7 cm.

Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

Finally, in seeking the source of his artistry in his personality, it is worth pointing out Mantegna was extraordinarily ambitious and he worked hard. His dedication to his craft and his physical energy led him to study, learn, and borrow ideas from other artists, whether from antiquity or from around the Europe of his time. He can hardly be called an eclectic artist, but he did absorb different styles and forge them together to create a distinct style of his own. Mantegna had the drive to get ahead and the will to create a striking artistic style which would catch the attention of his contemporaries. As it turns out, he had a teacher of note who himself was attracted to antiquity, and who imparted to his students progressive ideas.

The Renaissance period, with its ever-waxing secularism, presented a challenge to traditional Christian civilisation. Yet there was apparently no contradiction in Mantegna’s mind between Christian and secular thought. Most of Mantegna’s oeuvre consisted of sacred works, and in them he applied his keen observation of the natural world and his interest in pagan antiquity, the sculpture, architecture, clothing, and figural types of which fill his religious pictures as part of his historical approach. There were varying attitudes in fifteenth-century Italy, and some clerics and laymen too were puzzled as to why anyone would want a painting of Mars and Venus or would be vain enough to desire a self-portrait. Mantegna worked for a range of clients, and each had different expectations and needs. Some shunned the revival of classical culture and the expansion of the secular spirit, but for his part Mantegna moved freely from the sacred to the worldly. His liberal attitude won out, and by the end of Mantegna’s long life a peaceful coexistence held sway. A nearly seamless fusion of the sacred and profane came to form a chief aspect of Italian Renaissance culture.

In the following pages, we will look at Mantegna’s life and art. While only scattered documents exist for his earliest period, Mantegna’s mature years are better recorded, and we know more about him than any other Italian Renaissance artist before Leonardo da Vinci. We can trace his associations with patrons and public, friends and foes, teachers and colleagues in a way not possible with most other painters of the fifteenth century. We can explore the context of his artistry and establish the historical background and the nature of an art that has endured.

5. Map of Italy, c. 1450.

The University of Texas Libraries, Austin.

The Debut of a Prodigy: Mantegna’s Early years in Padua

Andrea Mantegna lived during a time of social and cultural change in Italy. The continuity of institutions – government, church, family – masks the social and cultural changes which occurred in Italy over several centuries leading up to Mantegna’s time. By the Quattrocento, in place of static, agrarian society there had developed flourishing, urban economies based on trade and small manufacturing. Fifteenth-century Italy had become evermore dominated by bankers, manufacturers, traders and lawyers rather than landholders. A dynamic social structure resulted from this shift toward mercantile, city life, leading to more head-to-head competition between individuals and families, and one had to get along in a constantly changing world which promised few people automatic status or continued prosperity. This shift was readily apparent in larger urban centres such as Florence and Venice, but was also felt in smaller cities and city-states where political control remained held by a single family, who had to operate in the framework of a dynamic balance of political power and had to survive in a fragmented world.

This competitive and changing atmosphere gave rise to a new, pragmatic attitude among Italians. People came more and more to observe, measure, describe, and admire the world around them; a new culture took root based increasingly on science, commerce, and exploration. Indeed, this worldly attitude would lead to the discovery of new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt aptly called the Renaissance the era of the “rediscovery of the world and of man.” This entailed broad intellectual changes, and affected all aspects of the sciences and the humanities. Italians became more keenly interested in what we would call psychology, analysis of family life and societal roles, and an incipient fascination with anthropological issues. There was even a new realistic approach taken in the social science of political philosophy; we recognise the pragmatic and sometimes cynical advice on statecraft of Niccolò Machiavelli as a sign of the times, a tough-minded response to the vicissitudes of ever-changing fortune. The new naturalism encompassed a growing focus on the personal experience, and this gave rise to a new kind of individualism. Renaissance literature, letters, and other records indicate a level of self-reflection and self-consciousness not seen since antiquity.

Fifteenth-century artists such as Mantegna responded to the growing interest in the real world with an increasing naturalism in their paintings and sculpture. The development of convincing perspective, the representation of cityscape and landscape views, and the growth of portraiture all progressed during the fifteenth century. Many painters consciously sought to imitate Nature, although some artists still indulged in unnatural effects and fantastic idealism in their art. Mantegna belonged to a group of artists known among contemporaries for their striking realism.

In addition to this ever-increasing engagement with material existence, another major aspect of the new, comprehensive investigation of the secular world was the rediscovery of antiquity, especially ancient Roman civilisation, which had left in Italy so many monuments and surviving literary texts in its wake. There developed an almost obsessive preoccupation in early Quattrocento Italy with all things classical: statues, poetry, inscriptions, and coins were collected, treasured, and studied, and ancient buildings were admired as never before since the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire nearly a thousand years before. These two focal points of Renaissance culture – a fascination with the real world (both human and natural) and a powerful attraction to classical art and civilisation – formed the central focal points of Andrea Mantegna’s art.

During the Middle Ages there remained only a lukewarm interest in the visual arts of Greek and Roman antiquity. Ancient Roman art was only known to a minor extent even in Italy, and there was little inclination to excavate the remains of a fallen, pagan civilisation. An incident that occurred in the central Italian city of Siena in the 1340s will serve to indicate the ambivalent attitude held toward the classical past in medieval Italy. A marble statue of the Roman goddess Venus was unearthed by chance and was placed in the central square of the city. The public was interested at first, and at least one painter even drew copies of it. But after a while the Sienese became worried, and some claimed it would bring disaster on the city if they continued to pay attention to this nude, heathen idol. The Sienese, who were at war with the Florentines at the time, smashed the sculpture into bits and crossed over one night into Florentine territory to bury the fragments, believing their enemies would come to suffer misfortune just by having these pieces in their lands!

This superstitious attitude changed rapidly in the early years of the fifteenth century. How different it was in the year of Mantegna’s death when the Laocoön was rediscovered near Rome. This ancient Greek sculpture, representing a high priest of Troy and his sons being strangled by a serpent sent by a punishing god, was universally admired when it was dug out of the ground in 1506. It was brought to the city in a grand parade as flowers were strewn in its path and church bells tolled, despite the pagan subject matter and the nudity of the figures. The Italian people had come to worship all things classical, and Mantegna – with his vividly painted representations of the ancient world – was an active player in the rebirth of Greek and Roman culture which has come to be called the Renaissance.

6. Francesco Squarcione, San Lazara Altarpiece, 1449-1452.

Tempera on panel. Musei Civici, Padua.

7. Martyrdom of St Christopher, c. 1448-1457.

Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

An important development in intellectual culture of the early fifteenth century was the remarkable rise in humanistic learning. Today there are several meanings and connotations for the word “humanist.” In the context of Renaissance history, a humanist is one whose chief field of study was literature, especially that of classical Greece and Rome. Some ancient literature was known throughout the Middle Ages, but it was studied largely for its value as way of improving one’s grammar, logic, and vocabulary, though its underlying paganism caused it to be held in suspicion. In the fourteenth- and, increasingly, the fifteenth century classical writings were avidly being sought by scholars and wealthy patrons. The Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1454) scoured the libraries in medieval monasteries in Switzerland and rediscovered manuscripts of works by Cicero and Tertullian; valuable texts which had been left rotting in piles of parchment, neglected and unknown for centuries. The scholar Niccolò Niccoli (d. 1437) rediscovered several classical texts, and he formed his own small collection of Roman statuary and cameos. By the time of Mantegna’s birth, the revival of classical literature and ideals was in full swing, the interest in antiquity fuelled by a tenacious and passionate group of humanists. The interest in classical culture spread quickly to a larger public in fifteenth-century Italy, well beyond the narrow ranks of humanist scholars. A whole new secular world opened that had hitherto been largely ignored, and people of all ages and social backgrounds came to embrace this great rediscovery. As a painter, Mantegna would cater to the demands of a public thirsting for art, both sacred and secular, which imitated the distant but laudable civilisations of classical antiquity.

The northern Italian city of Padua (Fig. 5), where Mantegna would begin his artistic career, had been the ancient Roman city of Patavium and in the fifteenth century as today still contained some classical ruins. In addition to these physical remains of Roman civilisation, it was a city redolent with the spirit of antiquity because of the intellectual interests there in ancient literature. Padua was one of the main centres in Renaissance Italy of humanist scholarship; its university was the chief institution of higher learning in the Venetian Republic (to which Padua was subjected in 1405 and thereafter), and a number of professors were leaders of their fields in the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature.

8. St James Baptising Hermogenes (destroyed), c. 1448-1457.

Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

Many of the humanists in Padua were passionate recorders of ancient inscriptions, and throughout his life Mantegna maintained a strong interest in classical Roman lettering. Some humanists became admirers and counsellors of Mantegna, including the artist’s friend Ulisse degli Aleotti and the scholar Giovanni Marcanova, the latter a professor at the University of Padua. Mantegna maintained friendly relations throughout his life with learned advisers, and his early conversion to the spirit of classical revivalism was owed in large part to the humanistic atmosphere in Padua, where patrons as well as local scholars shared a taste for Greek and Roman culture.

The world of humanist scholars and classically minded patrons was an elite realm. Mantegna’s parents, who were of humble stock and living in a provincial village, certainly knew little of this exciting literary revival or of the new Renaissance artistic style. Mantegna’s father was a country carpenter from Isola di Cartura, a small town a few miles outside of Padua. Andrea spent some of his early years herding cattle near the family’s village, yet he must have shown some early interest or talent in drawing, for by 1442, probably at about the age of ten or eleven (the standard age at the time to begin an apprenticeship), Andrea’s father took him to the thriving city of Padua to a certain master painter named Francesco Squarcione (c. 1394-1468) and asked he give the boy room and board and teach him to be a professional painter.

Francesco Squarcione is not exactly a household name today, but he was an important figure in Italian painting of the period. The records of his professional activity as an artist and teacher constitute some of the most colourful episodes of Renaissance art history. Squarcione started his career as a tailor and embroiderer, and only turned to painting later on in life. The extent of his own artistic output is in dispute, but it is generally agreed that at least two of his paintings have survived, a small altarpiece (Fig. 6) and a panel painting of the Madonna and Child. These works, although carried out with a lively sense of design and an attention to detail, demonstrate he was a competent but not extraordinary painter.

Yet his workshop, which he kept filled with apprentices and pupils over the years, was a novel institution. Although guild regulations classified his school as a workshop, Squarcione called it a studium, or what we might call an art studio. It was arguably the first professional art school in Italy and in Europe. Beginning in 1431 and continuing until his death in 1468, Squarcione trained over 130 young artists in his school, among them Andrea Mantegna.

9. Masolino, Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabatha, 1426-1427.

Fresco, 255 x 588 cm (full fresco). Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.

Boys came not just to help turn out works in the master’s style but to learn more broadly about the art of painting and design by studying plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statues and by copying some of the hundreds of drawings of works of art Squarcione had collected during his wide travels. Squarcione is said to have been to Greece (a rare experience for an artist of this period), making drawings of remarkable works of art, which he used in his courses of instruction. He would sometimes take boys in solely to teach them one aspect of painting, such as perspective. Thus, Squarcione introduced a novel idea into the art world: pupils could be more than mere apprentices. He treated them as students in a broader sense and taught them a variety of skills necessary to become independent masters.

Since a master painter could avoid paying some guild fees by collaborating with family members, Squarcione legally adopted several of his students as his own sons. Andrea Mantegna was one of these adoptees, and he called himself “Andrea Squarcione” as late as 1466, when he was a mature and accomplished artist. Mantegna lived with Squarcione as a pupil and collaborator from about 1441 until 1448, and Squarcione was undoubtedly an important influence on the boy’s artistic formation. Indeed, Squarcione bragged in a legal document he had “made Mantegna what he was”.

Despite the close relations and the legal adoption, Mantegna had to sue Squarcione to receive a greater payment for his collaboration with him. Indeed, many others working under Squarcione felt he was benefiting unduly from their work as pupils. They helped him complete commissions and he gave them room, board, instruction, and some payment, but sometimes they felt their remuneration was insufficient. One pupil sued Squarcione for not being capable of teaching what he promised. Still, it is clear Squarcione’s proto-academy for the arts was a new type of institution, and there were bound to be disputes about the conditions of one’s course of study and the contracts under which one gave assistance to the master-teacher. For his part, Mantegna perhaps settled his dispute with Squarcione amicably, for the two were in occasional professional relations with each other until Mantegna left Padua permanently in the late 1450s.

10. The Trial of St James (destroyed), c. 1448-1457.

Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

11. Niccolò Pizzolo, St Gregory in his Study (destroyed), c. 1448-1453.

Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

Squarcione’s use of plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek sculpture for teaching is of great importance, and surely Mantegna’s attraction to classical statuary and civilisation derived in a significant part from such instruction. Many Paduan scholars during the early fifteenth century fostered the rediscovery of classical culture, and the intellectual fascination with antiquity was shared by a broad public in Padua, as a growing number of prominent citizens were beginning to form collections of ancient Roman statuary, cameos, and coins; it is no wonder his studium for training painters gained the approval of Paduan scholars. One prominent Paduan humanist, Michele Savonarola, praised the Paduan school of painting, pointing out its learned character and praising its artists for their ability to represent perspective.

Mantegna’s lifelong utilisation of strong, and at times jumpy, perspective springs from his training in Squarcione’s studio. Mantegna went on to surpass Squarcione in depicting spatial depth and three-dimensionality, and he came to learn more about antiquity than Squarcione ever knew. He paid particular attention to the abundant remains of Roman architecture in northern Italy, so when he later went to Rome for the first time as a middle-aged man he had already had significant contact with the ruins of classical civilisation. In short, everything conspired to make Mantegna passionate about the ancient past and classical art: his artistic training with Squarcione, an educated public yearning for visual revivals of the ancient world, and his opportunity in northern Italy to study ancient art and architecture first-hand. We will see that his paintings included convincing and well-researched recreations of ancient Roman costumes, architecture, and sculpture.

Many of Squarcione’s pupils, including Mantegna, Giorgio Schiavone, and Marco Zoppo came to have certain features in common in their art: clear colouring, sharp, lively contours, profuse details, a certain restless energy, and a liberal use of classical elements such as swags of vegetation and architectural components. Mantegna surely learned the essence of his art in Squarcione’s studium. Yet, Mantegna was highly independent and precocious, and his art swiftly progressed beyond the training Squarcione gave him. In addition to the master’s in-house instruction, Squarcione must also have pointed him in the right direction in a search for sources of inspiration. Squarcione was not the most progressive artist in the area, and Mantegna would certainly have profited from seeing the works of several Florentine masters whose works were in Padua or in nearby Venice.

It was in Florence in the early fifteenth century that many of the aspects of the Early Renaissance style first developed, including vivid realism, use of linear perspective, clear storytelling, and the convincing representation of emotional expression. This style challenged the sweet, elegant Gothic manner, which continued to flourish in northern Italy until Mantegna’s time.

12. Preparatory drawing for the St James Led to Execution, c. 1448-1457.

Pen and ink and black chalk on paper, 15.5 x 23.4 cm. British Museum, London.

One of the characteristic exponents of the late Gothic style was Stefano da Zevio, whose Madonna and Child with God the Father in a Garden serves as an example of this graceful, decorative style: with its flowery background, elegant, ethereal figures, inexpressive faces, and delicate lighting running like quicksilver across the surfaces, it is characteristic of the traditional medieval fashion that was beginning to be replaced by the new tough and worldly manner which came to prevail in the early fifteenth century. In contrast to such a work, Mantegna would have been able to study Florentine Renaissance works in Venice, such as the saints by Andrea del Castagno in San Zaccaria, which convey a blunt, naturalistic, and monumental ideal of the human figure. Some bronze reliefs and freestanding figures by the Florentine sculptor Donatello were designed for the Paduan church of Sant’Antonio soon after 1443. These reliefs show the kind of deep space and dramatic narrative Mantegna would later echo in his own art. Donatello was mostly in Padua for the eleven years prior to 1453, and Mantegna is likely to have known him personally. Inspiration from Florentine art helped to propel art in northern Italy, including Mantegna’s, away from dreamy legacy of the late Middle Ages towards a brittle, dry, and more classicised style.

Blessed with a progressive training in the craft of painting and enviable talents, Mantegna was ready to start his professional career at an early age. In 1448, Mantegna painted an altarpiece in Padua for the high altar of the church of Santa Sophia. He was only seventeen years old, and even so this work was received with critical acclaim. Unfortunately this altarpiece is now lost. His next great commission came when he began, at the age of eighteen or so, to paint murals in a chapel in the Church of the Eremitani in Padua. The frescoes were commissioned by Antonio degli Ovetari, a member of a wealthy and established family of Padua.

After he died in 1448, his wife, Imperatrice, used the funds left in his will to have the project brought to completion. The chapel, a small section of the much larger church, was to be filled with frescoes depicting the lives of Saints James and Christopher. It is impossible to separate the religious from the secular motives of patrons of such grand projects, but clearly there was – in addition to the religious devotion of Antonio – a desire on his part to bring glory to himself and his whole family by causing such a great artwork to come into being. Indeed, murals in private chapels were essentially public monuments, symbols of the refinement and devotion of the local citizens; visitors to Padua from other parts of Italy and the rest of Europe would come to see the great frescoed walls of the Eremitani church. Today the family chapels of Italy form living museums, legacies of the religious spirit of the age as well as evidence of the personal pride of the patrons.