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5. Map of Italy, c. 1450. The University of Texas Libraries, Austin.

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 × 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 × 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.

13. St James Led to Execution (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

14. Self-Portrait (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

Since Antonio degli Ovetari and his wife Imperatrice had friends and associates who were learned and scholarly citizens of Padua, it is not surprising they would wish to have paintings done in the new Renaissance style, with strong classical overtones. And indeed, although some older, more conservative artists from Venice were for a brief time intended to share in the project (they eventually painted only some lesser parts of the chapel), it was the new generation of Renaissance painters who were destined to paint the great narrative scenes. The patrons perhaps turned first to the locally famous Squarcione, who then passed along the work largely to his talented student Mantegna. Other painters were involved as well. Another pupil of Squarcione, Niccolò Pizzolo, was now a practicing painter and sculptor, and he got a large part of the commission. Pizzolo died in a sword fight at the age of thirty-three, before he could paint anything but a few figures around the perimeter and on the vault of the chapel; he also made the sculptured altar showing the Madonna and Saints, its wiry figures inspired by the style of Donatello.

Pizzolo was about ten years older than Mantegna, and he must have impressed upon the young artist the importance of studying the new Tuscan Renaissance manner, which he had so thoroughly imbibed. Indeed, the Ovetari Chapel is a microcosm of the pattern of change which brought about the change toward the new style in art. Older masters did not respond favourably to the Tuscan Renaissance style, but the younger generation, including Mantegna and Pizzolo, took the lead in ushering the novel manner in to their local setting. This shift occurred in city after city during the fifteenth century – including Ferrara, Milan, Venice, Urbino – as the central Italian style was adopted, interpreted, and varied by a wide range of artists. Compared to Mantegna and Pizzolo, even the work of Squarcione was rather conservative and unadventurous (cf. Fig. 6); it was the master’s training and open attitude to the study of various styles that was progressive. The Ovetari Chapel was a showpiece of artistic revolution, and Mantegna, thanks partly due to the early death of Pizzolo, was responsible for the greatest part of the work.

The Ovetari Chapel was almost completely destroyed during an aerial raid in 1944 when a cluster of bombs meant for the nearby railroad yards fell wide of the mark. Fortunately, colour illustrations of the works were taken shortly before the destruction. Some of the works were removed from the wall for restoration before the raid, notably Mantegna’s Assumption of the Virgin (Fig. 19) and his Martyrdom of Saint Christopher (Fig. 7); these survive and have been reinstalled in the chapel, giving us an idea of Mantegna’s great achievement.

Some of the more extraordinary works of art of the fifteenth century resulted from the application of Renaissance ideals of lively and detailed narrative to the illustration of fantastic medieval accounts of saints. Most of Mantegna’s scenes in the Ovetari Chapel were drawn from the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, a thirteenth-century Dominican priest from northern Italy. His colourful stories of the lives of saints are often lacking in historical authenticity or Biblical authority, but for centuries they moved and inspired the faithful to worship Christian martyrs and heroes. In Mantegna’s time, despite new secular trends in culture, the religious fervour of the Middle Ages had not passed. Men and women still saw visions, went on long pilgrimages, believed in miracles, and feared the intervention of the devil in human affairs. The frescoes of the Ovetari Chapel were painted for people who still passionately believed in the power of God and even in the veracity of the most far-fetched Christian legends. On the left wall of the Ovetari Chapel Mantegna represented scenes from the life of Saint James the Greater. Niccolò Pizzolo was originally to have painted part of the left wall, but his slowness and his early death meant Mantegna ended up painting this wall, working off and on between 1449 and 1455 (Fig. 16).

15. Niccolò Pizzolo, Self-Portrait (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

Already at this early stage in his life Mantegna proved he was one of the great illustrators of the Renaissance, for he could take a simple text and present a clear and faithful narrative while also painting in his own unique style, based on a dry realism and a thoughtful attempt to re-create the style, costumes, and architecture of antiquity. Mantegna began painting at the top of the wall with a scene from the Bible (Matthew 3:21 and Mark 1:19), representing Christ calling the fishermen James and John to join him in his cause (Fig. 18). That these are specimens of the new style in painting would have been instantly obvious to contemporaries; instead of the sweet, decorative, soft style of Gothic painting, here we see a simple composition, and a sweeping landscape of heroic grandeur. Mantegna’s stocky, tough figures have the substance and blunt realism reminiscent of Roman sculpture.

The rest of Mantegna’s scenes follow the narrative of James’ life as told by Jacobus de Voragine, whose Golden Legend included some especially dramatic, if improbable, details of the life of James. The legendary account is lively enough, but young Mantegna fleshed out the details of the story even further in his mural, adding his own particular narrative clarity and classical features. In one panel, Saint James is shown preaching to a crowd in the Holy Land. However, a certain magician named Hermogenes, intent on rooting out Christianity, had demons come and try to cast a spell on the saint. Here is Mantegna’s vivid realism and dramatic narrative; the crowd includes a variety of emotional attitudes, from frightened contemplation to outright terror, and the scene is presented by Mantegna with economy and force. Even his bits of classical sculpture add to the drama, as a carved dolphin leaps above the lintel to the door on the right, and a very realistic stone head in a roundel seems to cry out in fright. To further enliven the work, Mantegna shows various chubby little boys (called putti in Italian), climbing about on swags of fruit, and one of them is even falling off! This kind of busy, witty detail would remain characteristic of his artistic style. Certainly, nothing in the legendary account by Voragine helped the young artist to invent such a striking and eye-catching motif.

In the next scene, James forced the demons to bring Hermogenes before him, and in this scene James is shown baptising the magician, the water splashing off of his bald head (Fig. 8). This section marks a breakthrough for Mantegna in its representation of space, for it is the first time he employed the rigorous, single-point perspective system that was a hallmark of Early Renaissance painting in Florence. Increasingly, fifteenth-century viewers wanted the precision of a carefully constructed perspective system offering the convincing illusion that a window to another world has been opened up beyond the picture frame. In single-point perspective, a grid of orthogonal and transversal lines marks the apparent diminution of space, with the orthogonals leading back to a single vanishing point.

16. The Excecution of St James, c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

17. Masaccio, The Tribute Money, c. 1428. Fresco, 255 × 598 cm. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Camine, Florence.

Perspective, an important aspect of Renaissance visual culture, was a way to organise the chaos of visual experience, using an orderly, mathematical system. Artistic perspective is an objective and scientific method of spatial organisation, but it is also intensely subjective, showing the world as if seen by an individual spectator who occupies a particular position in the world. Medieval artists, with their otherworldly vision, were not interested in such a rigorous organisation of picture space. The system did contain two appealing aspects for Italians of the fifteenth century, for it is timelessly mathematical on the one hand and very personal on the other. It became the standard system of spatial organisation in Italian painting, although, as with other innovations, its adoption happened over the course of two generations, occurring one city and one artist at a time.

In his Saint James Baptising Hermogenes, all the lines in the pavement, on the entablature at the left, the lines of the roof and so forth converge on a single point on the right, giving the little city square in Jerusalem where the action takes place plausible depth on the chapel wall. This system was not used in the Preaching of Saint James, where one can sense even without measuring it that the space was cramped and inaccurately drawn. Clearly, during the time between the making of these works, Mantegna had learned about the new perspective system. Squarcione did not seem to comprehend single-point perspective until later in his life, so Mantegna must have learned the system elsewhere. Perhaps Mantegna had seen the book On Painting by the theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1435), in which the author set out in simple terms the rules for making paintings in perspective (Fig. 8). Or maybe Mantegna received a perspective drawing or instructions from the Florentine sculptor Donatello, who was making reliefs for the nearby church in Padua at this time using convincing spatial recession in elaborate settings.

18. The Calling of James and John (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

In addition to using single-point perspective and filling his works with reminiscences of antiquity, Mantegna linked his art to classical thought and humanism through its very simplicity and economy. A widespread belief in antiquity, revived by fifteenth-century theorists like Leon Battista Alberti, was that art should be direct, simple, and without unnecessary elements and affectation; some pictorial variety is good, but overabundance is distracting and unworthy of the best artistic minds. A good painting, like a good person, it was thought, is without excess and without superfluous finery. In this spirit, Mantegna’s story-telling is economical and vivid. Thus, the young artist managed to convey the moral quality of classical culture as well as including in his murals specific details borrowed from Greco-Roman art. Included throughout these murals is Mantegna’s adaptation of Roman drapery style. Avoiding the gentle, curvilinearity of late Gothic painting, Mantegna depicts garments that are folded, bent, and weighty, resembling the heavy and simplified garment style found in Roman relief sculpture and in the works of Donatello, who was also indebted to the ancients. It is possible that in arriving at this manner Mantegna used small wooden models of figures cloaked in wet cloth. Thus, in his drapery folds, as elsewhere in his art, Mantegna turned away from Gothic tradition, basing his art instead on Roman antiquity, the Tuscan Renaissance and real models.

Mantegna’s inclination to draw inspiration from classical art is brought to a dramatic climax in the Trial of Saint James (Fig. 10). Having been denounced for his aggressive efforts to spread the word of Christ, James is brought before the ruler Herod Agrippa, who is dressed in a carefully researched version of a Roman costume. The triumphal arch behind is a variant on those found throughout the Roman Empire, several of which survived in the fifteenth century in northern Italy. It is replete with inscriptions, only partly legible, written in beautiful, clear Roman lettering typical of thousands of surviving examples of Roman writing on stone. Even Squarcione had written in his paintings with a cursive, decorative Gothic script, but Mantegna adopted the humanistic practice of imitating the blockier, simpler Roman style of lettering.

19. Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

20. Niccolò Pizzolo, God the Father (destroyed), c. 1448–1453. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.

Among the reliefs in the Trial of Saint James (Fig. 10) are portraits of two Roman emperors, probably Augustus and Nero, and above the emperors is a rectangular panel representing a pagan sacrifice. This last relief is evidence of the ambivalent attitude held in the fifteenth century toward the classical past: Renaissance men admired its artistic forms and certain aspects of its thought, but they lamented the opposition of Roman paganism to Christianity. Mantegna’s depiction of a pagan sacrifice was a reminder to fifteenth-century viewers that the Romans practised, not the ritual sacrifice of Christ’s own flesh and blood, but the sacrificial slaughter of animals. In another part of the picture, Mantegna adumbrates the victory of Christianity over paganism: the ancients celebrated their victories, as seen by the presence of female allegorical Victory figures on the spandrels just atop the arch, but the inclusion of those allegories here would have been interpreted by Renaissance viewers as an indication that Christianity would triumph over pagan religion and secular power.

Mantegna’s mastery of space and illusionism grew as he worked in the chapel, and the Saint James Led to Execution surpasses all his earlier efforts (Fig. 13). Here the figures and the massive triumphal arch – roughly based on the now-lost Arch of the Gavi in Verona – are shown in worm’s-eye view, foreshortened from below as one would see them from the very floor of the chapel. All this echoes the miraculous event taking place. According to the account in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, on the way to his execution James cured a scribe, who is kneeling on the road. The soldier on the far left holding the rope was inspired by this miracle and looks on with quiet sympathy. A well-armed centurion toward the centre gestures in amazement. On the far right, in the kind of gripping motif that helped to establish his reputation as an exciting painter, Mantegna shows one onlooker trying to push his way into the area where the saint stands. A Roman soldier forces him away and they shout at each other, their anger echoed by the flapping banner above and the turning of the corner of a crenellated building toward the viewer. Space rushes back to the left of this pair, the eye drawn to a soldier with a shield anchoring his body position, the motif drawn from Donatello’s marble Saint George at Orsanmichele in Florence, a work Mantegna must have known through a copy. Mantegna wanted to make his painting as vigorous and vivid as possible, qualities which come out also in the boldly executed sketch he made in preparation for painting this remarkable composition (Fig. 12).

The climax of Mantegna’s work on this wall is the Execution of Saint James, his youthful masterpiece and indeed one of the great paintings of the Early Renaissance (Fig. 16). The saint is lying on the ground, and is about to be beheaded by an executioner who will strike a sharpened board with a mallet, a clumsy system lacking the humane precision of the later guillotine. Mantegna’s clever invention comes through in his use of the tearing motif: as the neck of the saint is about to be severed, one sees overhead a snapped branch, a split building in the upper left, a fissure in the upper part of the wall on the right, and a tear in the cloak on the arm of the executioner. The illusionism Mantegna had been developing in all the earlier scenes finally results in the ultimate, explosive spatial device: the viewer might expect that in a moment the head of Saint James will fall at his feet in the chapel of the Ovetari. The Execution of Saint James vividly makes it appear that the scene depicted and the world of the viewer are coterminous.

21. The Agony in the Garden, c. 1455. Tempera on panel, 63 × 80 cm. The National Gallery, London.

22. Giovanni Bellini, The Agony in the Garden, c. 1460. Tempera on panel, 81.3 × 127 cm. The National Gallery, London.

Antonio degli Ovetari was not alive to see Mantegna’s work progress in his family chapel, but his wife was, and she had occasion to question the artist’s execution of the next scene, the Assumption of the Virgin, which still survives on the far wall of the chapel (Fig. 19). Imperatrice filed a complaint and a minor civil suit against Mantegna because he did not include all twelve Apostles. Renaissance artists were often paid by the figure, and she argued the artist should receive less money than originally agreed because of the omission. Mantegna, given the restriction of space, thoughtfully limited the number of Apostles to eight, avoiding a consequent crowding and weakening of the composition.

One artist testified in court that Mantegna would have to have made the figures much smaller to fit them in, but he could have done so if he wished. Another master was more supportive of Mantegna. The sculptor Pietro da Milano argued Mantegna truly had room only for eight figures; adding the heads of the other Apostles would have spoiled the perspective of the picture. Pietro stated Mantegna’s painting was made “cum magna arte,” with great artfulness, and he should receive the payment the Ovetari family promised, which is how the matter was finally resolved. It is significant that Mantegna was willing to turn his back on tradition and represent not what was literally correct and usually done but what worked best artistically. Certainly this is a new dramatic type of Assumption, including vigorously gesturing Apostles who twist and turn in amazement as the Virgin ascends to Heaven. Mantegna increases the impact by making the action take place at night, set against a black backdrop. There is a flurry of active angels around Mary, and brilliant, eye-catching stars adorn the underside of the fictive arch.

Mantegna had other legal difficulties during these early years in the Ovetari Chapel. We have mentioned Niccolò Pizzolo as a contributor to the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel and, like Mantegna, as an artist working in the new Renaissance style, however he also engaged in official challenges to Mantegna’s work. Pizzolo fought to get as great a share as he could in the commission, and in September 1449 Pizzolo and Mantegna sought the arbitration of an outside expert. There was so much ill will between the painters it was necessary for the judge to decree neither should physically obstruct the work of the other, and Pizzolo must not block Mantegna’s light by erecting a screen in the chapel. The arbitrator stated Pizzolo should be allowed to paint one of the histories on the Saint James wall, but the artist never took advantage of this opportunity. Mantegna had wanted to design the altarpiece, so the commission for the terracotta piece to Pizzolo was another favourable ruling for him from the arbitrator.

This altar and the ceiling vault paintings by Pizzolo (Figs. 11 and 20) show he was indeed a serious challenger, his bold foreshortenings and expressive figures at least equal to the work of Mantegna, who had also studied with the famous Squarcione. In 1448, one pupil wanted to study with Pizzolo with the intent of learning to “pingere in recente”, to paint in the modern style, an indication it was well known that Pizzolo was practicing the very latest and most exciting style. It is easy to imagine the intensity of the emotional atmosphere as two brilliant artists, Pizzolo and Mantegna, worked in the same small chapel, fighting for space and for the accolades of the public.

This competition must have increased the inclination of both men to achieve the newest and most striking effects possible in their art. Indeed, the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari recorded working alongside Pizzolo gave to Mantegna “no little help and incentive by the competition.”[2] This competition ended only when Pizzolo was killed in a fight in 1453; Niccolò had a history of trouble with the law, and apparently had an even more troublesome personality than Mantegna. These artists left further evidence of their great egos and intense personalities by painting their portraits in giant form just outside the chapel entrance. There has been some scholarly debate about which head is a portrait of which man; at any rate, both self-likenesses are characterised by tough realism and convey the combative natures of the artists (Figs. 14 and 15). Mantegna also left a searing self-portrait in the Trial of Saint James, showing himself as a scowling, terrible Roman soldier, offering us a glimpse of the strength of character of the artist who created these frescoes (Fig. 10). Indeed, all his later self-portraits indicate an intense, almost ferocious personality (see also Figs. 53 and 81).

The other artists working in the chapel were not as great as Pizzolo or Mantegna. Some other painters little known today, including Bono da Ferrara and Ansuino da Forli, helped Mantegna complete the wall on the right side of the chapel with scenes of the life of Saint Christopher. Their efforts are competent but without the novelty and incisive quality of Mantegna’s work. Yet both their frescoes were in the new Renaissance style, and their art did not clash with that of the more progressive masters at work in the chapel. Christopher, a legendary saint whose story was again elaborately related in the Golden Legend of Voragine, was removed from the official list of Roman Catholic saints in 1969, but in the Renaissance and later he was revered as a protector of travellers and all who went about their daily rounds. Bono da Ferrara shows him in his most famous role, that of bearer of Christ across a river, the sins of the world contained in Christ’s body straining Christopher’s giant form. Mantegna’s task was to show the execution of the saint, which takes place on the bottom register of the compartmentalised wall (Fig. 7). This part of the fresco cycle does survive, although it is much damaged, and to be able to make out large sections of the missing pigment it is necessary to turn to an important early copy.

23. Pietro Perugino, St Sebastian, c. 1490–1500, Oil on wood, 176 × 116 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

In medieval times, a new episode was added to early Christian legends of Christopher, relating how when his execution was ordered by the King of Lycia, forty archers were called on to kill the giant. Yet the arrows did not harm Christopher, and one of the arrows turned around in mid-air and landed instead in the eye of the king, who cries out as the arrow strikes and blinds him in Mantegna’s rendering. In a characteristic spatial device, the painter sets Christopher outside the architectural moulding, putting him into the space of the viewer. The next part of the scene unfolds on the right side of this work; although spatially connected to the left side, it represents a later moment in time, when Christopher is finally beheaded (since the arrows failed), and his body is being dragged through the streets. The saint is depicted in bold foreshortening on the ground and his head, lying close by before the spectator, has a shock effect like that of the beheading of Saint James directly across the chapel. Early sources tell us many of the figures in the crowd on the right are portraits of Mantegna’s contemporaries, most of them Paduan noblemen, doctors, and humanists, who formed an important component of the artist’s appreciative public.

In his work for the Ovetari Chapel, Mantegna achieved an incredible feat, and one can argue the torch passed to him as the leading painter in Italy. In a perhaps unexpected turn of events, the young Paduan painter came closer than any other Italian painter to fulfilling the goals of the period as set out by a chief theoretician, Leon Battista Alberti who stressed, in his widely read and admired treatise On Painting of 1435, art should show figures who are alive down to their very fingernails, and painting should tell stories vividly and with an economy of means, representing in a memorable and accurate way human gestures, emotions, and attitudes. In accordance with the humanist’s advice, Mantegna’s art improves Nature, not just imitates it; the painter set out to better and ennoble the real world. Alberti, and many others, also recommended painters and sculptors borrow freely from Greek and Roman models. Because in the Renaissance no ancient paintings were yet known (this was before the excavation of such sites as Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century), Mantegna had to borrow from the world of Roman sculpture and architecture, and he recreated his own inventive world of antiquity. In short, in these earliest works Mantegna changed the course of Italian art, and he fulfilled more completely than any other artist the aspirations the progressive Early Renaissance opinion about what it is that constitutes good, lively painting.

This is not to say Mantegna faced no criticism in these early years. Certainly some of the late Gothic painters and their loyal public must have thought his work to be harsh, overly realistic, and lacking the suave gracefulness of the traditional style they practised. Even Mantegna’s teacher, Francesco Squarcione, is recorded (by the biographer Giorgio Vasari) to have carped at Mantegna’s murals in the Ovetari Chapel. He said Mantegna’s figures looked as though they are sculptures rather than real people, saying of the frescoes in the chapel, “They were inferior work since when he did them Andrea had imitated marble statues. Stone”, said Squarcione, “was essentially a hard substance and it could never convey the softness and tenderness of flesh and natural objects, with the various movements and folds.”[3] This remark must have stung Mantegna (and puzzled him, since Squarcione had young Andrea learn by copying plaster casts), and it is possible the more supple figures and the slight softening of forms and colours occurring in the later Saint James scenes and in the Execution of Saint Christopher were a result of his adjustment to such criticism. And the young artist and his former master exchanged more than words at this time: in 1456, Mantegna sued Squarcione (and won) to break the legal partnership they had established in 1448 when he was still a minor.

24. St Sebastian, c. 1455–1460. Tempera on panel, 68 × 30 cm. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna.

25. The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1450–1455. Tempera on canvas (transferred from panel), 40 × 55.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

26. St Euphemia, 1454. Tempera on canvas, 171 × 78 cm. Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples.

In addition to all his interactions with Squarcione and other artists during the years of the Ovetari Chapel, Mantegna also entered at this time into a long relationship with the great family of artists from Venice, the Bellini. It is even possible this new association helped to sour his relations with Squarcione, who might have resented his adopted son’s new artistic relations. At any rate, Mantegna came into close contact with the work of the Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini, for in 1453 Mantegna married Bellini’s daughter, Nicolosia. Jacopo Bellini’s art contained much Mantegna must have admired. Bellini made many drawings of daring perspective views, and he was fascinated with fragments of antique sculpture and architecture, as we can see in one of his drawings.

Jacopo’s painting style was subtle and showed great perception of the effects of light; perhaps his skill as a painter served as a model for Mantegna in his development. Jacopo’s sons Gentile Bellini and Giovanni Bellini would become leading painters in Venice, and there would continue to be a mutual exchange of ideas between these brothers-in-law, all contemporaries and leaders in their field. One fruit of his association with the Bellini family is Mantegna’s early Agony in the Garden, which recalls a similar work by Giovanni Bellini, both being based ultimately on a composition of the elder, Jacopo Bellini (Figs. 21 and 22). One of the last commissions Mantegna would undertake remained unfinished at his death, and the project was completed in part by his brother-in-law Giovanni more than fifty years after the time of the Ovetari Chapel (see Fig. 93). It is likely Giovanni Bellini learned a great deal from Mantegna in the early years of their contact, but later Giovanni’s style moved in another, independent direction, becoming far softer than Andrea’s and more harmonious in light and colouring. This can already be seen in the compositions on the same theme, hung nearby in the National Gallery in London. Giovanni’s Agony in the Garden (Fig. 22), showing Christ and the sleeping Apostles approached by Judas and the Roman soldiers who will arrest Christ. Bellini’s picture is luminous and soft in texture, with a pictorial unity created by the light and colour. In his version, Mantegna has created a stony sharp world, with bare branches against the sky, strongly foreshortened Apostles, and angels riding on a firm bank of clouds, the work dominated by pebbles, erupting masses of mountain, and striated rock in the middleground (Fig. 21). Not only do these paintings indicate the difference between the Venetian style of the Renaissance and Mantegna’s stony approach; they are incipient examples of the divide between the linear and the painterly approaches to art-making, a contrast that would for centuries come to characterise two major schools of painting in Europe.

The fame that ensued from the work on the Ovetari Chapel frescoes would eventually bring Mantegna an opportunity to become a well-paid court painter in the city-state of Mantua. Before moving there in 1459, he completed several other notable works on religious themes. One of these is his Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 25), which he perhaps made for Borso d’Este, ruler of the city-state of Ferrara, located a hundred kilometres south-west of Padua (see Fig. 5). With this work we finally have a chance to assess a surviving easel painting by young Mantegna, painted in tempera, a mixture of egg and ground pigment that allows more minute and searching pictorial effects than the fresco technique he used in the Ovetari Chapel. Here Mantegna paints in incredible detail seemingly every stone, leaf, and sheep in the landscape. Mantegna’s skill at representing Nature is apparent in the atmospheric clouds, which are beautifully struck by the light, reflecting his close observation of the natural world. This painting also reveals on a small scale Mantegna’s emotional intensity, the picture including fervent shepherds and a loving, maternal Virgin. The Adoration of the Shepherds was widely admired and copied in Mantegna’s lifetime, a remarkable homage to so young an artist, still in his early twenties. Surely one of the new and attractive elements of this painting for Italian contemporaries of Mantegna was the coarse realism of the two shepherds, who approach the foreshortened Child and begin to genuflect. In earlier traditions of Italian painting it was customary to make all the figures look ideal, whether heroic or merely pretty, but Mantegna gives these men – with their brutal faces, torn clothing, and bare feet – a rustic crudity that was new in Italian art. This is a good early example of the kind of biting realism that would continue to be a hallmark of Mantegna’s artistry.

Humanistic themes never remained far off for Mantegna at any stage of his career. His Saint Euphemia, now in Naples (Fig. 26) seems to represent a classical Roman statue in a niche, with the swag of fruit, in ancient fashion, depicted overhead, and the inscription delineated in an accurate all’antica manner. The lion plays with the arm of the saint, his action helping to alleviate the severity of the spare Doric setting and the stoic reticence of Euphemia. This humanism can also be seen in his early, and justifiably famous, Saint Sebastian (Fig. 24). Sebastian was a Roman army officer of the third century who secretly became a Christian. When word of this conversion was known, his superiors ordered Sebastian’s own troops to shoot him with arrows. Mantegna’s saint makes for difficult viewing, as he is pierced with numerous arrows, including ones in his forehead and neck. We do not know for whom Mantegna painted the Saint Sebastian, but it is a perfect picture for someone with antiquarian or scholarly interests, and we must assume a learned patron enjoyed the classical references in this painting. At Sebastian’s feet and behind him are fragments of Roman sculpture, the kind of marble pieces being eagerly collected at that time by growing ranks of connoisseurs of antique art. More than one ancient Greek and Roman writer noted Nature, like an artist, forms recognisable shapes in clouds, and Mantegna here shows a marvellous horse and rider in the cloud on the upper left, the kind of pictorial detail that would have delighted his erudite viewers. The saint is bound to the column of a classical triumphal arch, which includes a beautiful Victory in the spandrel. This triumphal arch serves a double purpose, to allow one to admire antiquity, but also to stress Christianity’s triumph over Roman paganism, as attested by the crumbling condition of the arch. Thus, Mantegna manages to honour the Christian religion of his patrons as well as satisfy their interest in the classical past. Mantegna was surely pleased with this work, and proud of his liaison with the world of learning in Padua, for he prominently signed his name in Greek just to the saint’s right; the inscription states this is “the work of Andrea M.” Mantegna could not have known much Greek, and there is nothing Greek about the subject or the setting; but the young painter took the opportunity anyway to show off a bit of his own fascination with the classical past. This is Mantegna’s form of classicism, however, not a timeless calm, but an aggressive, ruptured scene echoing the saint’s suffering. The painter turns the paving squares in jarring points towards the picture plane, and the saint stands on a stone fragment with its pointed corner turned outward at an even more destabilising off-angle. The fragments consist of shattered bits of masonry, heads, and feet, and the triumphal arch has its brick core laid bare. The saint prevails over a moral world in collapse.

27. San Zeno Altarpiece, c. 1457–1459. Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore, Verona.

28. The Crucifixion (from the San Zeno Altarpiece), c. 1457–1459. Tempera on panel, 66 × 90 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

29. Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection of Christ, c. 1463. Fresco. Palazzo Comunale, San Sepolcro.

Despite his attempt at sharp realism, Mantegna’s Sebastian is not rendered with complete anatomical accuracy. Although in the fifteenth century there was a growing interest in such subjects as the human body and medicine, it was not until later in the fifteenth century when artists such as Leonardo da Vinci would carry out dissections of the human figure in order to arrive at more scientific and convincing representations. Many of Mantegna’s supporters in learned circles might have praised his naturalism, just as so many ancient writers lauded the realism of their contemporary artists, but Renaissance humanists, being literary men, did not frequently spur on artists to dissect and scrutinise the human body. Instead, they emphasised the study of antique sculpture, and indeed the rib cage and abdominal musculature of Mantegna’s tormented saint recall the anatomical definition of the male body as often found in classical sculpture. But whatever its deviations from natural appearance, Mantegna’s saint probably seemed convincingly real to contemporary viewers who were accustomed to seeing rubbery, elegant Gothic figures. Here, as frequently happened in Mantegna’s work and in other Renaissance painting, the investigation of the real world was filtered through the vision and artistic conventions of classical antiquity.

When Mantegna received the offer to move to Mantua in 1457 he delayed the move more than two years because he had other commissions to fulfil, especially his impressive San Zeno altarpiece (Fig. 27). In the larger panel stand the Madonna and Saints, and in the predella below are representations of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (left), the Crucifixion (centre), and the Resurrection of Christ (right). Mantegna painted the altarpiece in 1457–1459 for the church of San Zeno in Verona, where it is still kept, although all the smaller panels have been taken away to museums and have been replaced in the original altarpiece by copies. The work was commissioned by Gregorio Correr, a wealthy Venetian who had held a position of authority over the church in Verona, which is not so far from Padua and which, like Padua, was part of the Venetian Republic. Correr had received a solid humanist education in Mantua, studying with the famous humanist teacher Vittorino da Feltre. Later he wrote a tragedy which, for centuries, was mistaken for an original Roman work of drama. Because of his own interests in antiquity, Correr was undoubtedly attracted to the classical revival aspects of Mantegna’s artistry.

This altarpiece is an exuberant exposition of Mantegna’s style and must have created a shock when it was unveiled to the public in Verona, where the demure, polite traditions of International Gothic painting were still alive and widely practised. Here Mantegna unleashed a profusion of colour, three-dimensional form, and archaeological detail, all rendered in a crisp linear fashion. Even the frame is not in the usual Gothic form, which would have called for intricate foliage, slender colonnettes, and pointed arches. Well into the fifteenth century, works by Renaissance artists were frequently paired with frames made by artists working in the late, decorative Gothic style. But here Mantegna designed his own frame, which was carried out by a sculptor working under his instructions. The four great Corinthian columns and the other classical details make this monumental frame different from anything the public in Verona would have known. Moreover, in a clever stroke, Mantegna painted the swags of fruit between the real columns of the frame and the painted pilasters behind, setting up an effective and witty spatial continuity between the frame and the depicted world.

The form of the main panel is called a “holy conversation” (sacra conversazione in Italian) in which saints, who lived in various historical times, are shown gathered in one place to honour the Virgin and Child. The saints include most prominently Saint Peter on the far left and Saint John the Baptist on the far right, as well as several other bishop saints and female martyrs. Most of his earlier paintings depicted saints in separate isolated panels, not grouped together in this way (see Fig. 6). Indeed, a few years earlier, Mantegna – perhaps at the urging of the patron – made an old-fashioned polyptych for the church of Santa Giustina in Padua in 1453–1454 (Fig. 31), with figures set isolated in niches and placed against gold backgrounds. But the San Zeno altarpiece is different in its spatial and figural unity. A few instances of the unified sacra conversazione had preceded Mantegna, but no other artist had included so many saints and so many other architectural and decorative elements in what had been a very conservative, staid tradition of altarpieces with compartmentalised panels. Mantegna took on the challenge of making a different kind of altarpiece, and he created one of his most striking works.

30. The Resurrection of Christ (from the San Zeno Altarpiece), v. 1457–1459. Tempera on panel, 71 × 94 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours.

To help illustrate Mantegna’s own particular contribution to Italian Renaissance art, we can turn to one scene from the predella, the Resurrection of Christ (Fig. 30). Mantegna’s style would become a bit more restrained and controlled in colour and action later in his life, but here his youthful exuberance and ambition are full-blown. In order to gauge the extent of Mantegna’s exciting earliest manner, it is illuminating to examine it with a comparable contemporary version by the central Italian painter Piero della Francesca (Fig. 29). Piero created a Resurrection of Christ in which the forms are heavy, geometric, and weighed down by gravity and by the pyramidal composition. As in the works of the Florentine painter Masaccio, one of his chief sources of inspiration, Piero creates a static, monumental scene that conveys a sense of grandiosity and calm. Mantegna, on the other hand, dazzles with an explosion of energy and excitement. Christ bursts out of his sarcophagus, surrounded by a bright aura of light rays and angels. The soldiers who were supposed to be guarding him react in surprise and horror, and seem to be physically thrown back by Christ’s sudden return from the dead. Trees burst impossibly out of rocks, their roots having broken the substance of the stone in surface patterns, and isolated grasses cling tenaciously to the rocky ground. Christ strikes a confident, virile stance, in form an ancient Roman athlete posing as the Lamb of God.

The Crucifixion (Fig. 28) from the predella of the San Zeno Altarpiece is Mantegna’s striking contribution to the history of the representation of this subject. The space – beginning with the repoussoir device of the soldiers at the bottom of the design area – shoots into the background, as the rocky surface forms a kind of lined piazza. The plateau composition, a device derived from earlier Netherlandish art, comprises an elevated foreground plane, a spatial descent, and a rising background, complete with a distant, winding road and hilltop city. As usual, Mantegna considers every detail. Christ’s body is suspended against the sky, his feet just touching the level of the earth, a prefiguration of his coming Ascension into Heaven. The bad thief, on Christ’s left, is in a contorted pose and is set against the sharp rock formations and brittle branches. The good thief is depicted more fully in the light, is set against the rounded hill, and stands above Mary and other holy mourners. Every anatomical detail of Christ’s and the thieves’ torsos is fully delineated, contributing to the tension of the narrative. The whole work has the feeling of a large scale mural, despite its modest size.

This dynamic narrative style, along with Mantegna’s incisive realism and his abundant use of classical motifs, had won the artist a place in the highest echelons of critical acclaim. He was sought after, but rather than continuing to compete in the open market by seeking various public or private commissions in Padua or elsewhere, he took up the post of court painter in Mantua, a job that would provide a steady, guaranteed income and a chance for him to apply his artistic genius to a wide variety of projects. The twenty-eight-year-old Mantegna set out with his family for Mantua in 1459, probably not suspecting he would stay there until the end of his life nearly half a century later.

31. St Luke Altarpiece, 1453–1454. Tempera on panel, 230 × 177 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.