Andrea Mantegna 1431 - 1506

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Andrea Mantegna1431 - 1506

• Kevin J. Benoy

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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Andrea Mantegna

• Mantegna was fascinated by the possibilities that
  perspective offered.
• He employed the so-called worms eye
  perspective to give an unusual viewpoint in many
  of his works.

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Andrea Mantegna

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

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