Years as court painter in Mantua

Mantegna has been characterized as strongly jealous of his independence; yet by entering the service of the marchese di Montova (Mantua), Ludovico Gonzaga, in 1459, he was forced to submit to limitations on his freedom of travel and acceptance of commissions from other patrons. Despite such restrictions, Mantegna journeyed to Florence and Pisa in 1466–67, where he renewed contact with works of art by Donatello, Fra Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, and Andrea del Castagno. During this decade (1460–70), Mantegna produced his finest small-scale works, such as The Circumcision and the Venice St. George.

The Gonzaga patronage provided Mantegna a fixed income (which did not always materialize) and the opportunity to create what became his best-known surviving work, the so-called Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua. Earlier practitioners of 15th-century perspective delimited a rectangular field as a transparent window onto the world and constructed an imaginary space behind its front plane. In the Camera degli Sposi, however, Mantegna constructed a system of homogeneous decoration on all four walls of the room, mainly by means of highly realistic painted architectural elements on walls and ceilings, which from ground level convincingly imitate three-dimensionally extended shapes. Though the ceiling is flat, it appears concave. Mantegna transformed the small interior room into an elegant open-air pavilion, to which the room’s real and fictive occupants (actually one and the same, since the beholders must have been members of that very court) were transported from deep within an essentially medieval urban castle.

Directly above the centre of the room is a painted oculus, or circular opening to the sky, with putti (nude, chubby child figures) and women around a balustrade in dramatically foreshortened perspective. The strong vertical axis created by the oculus locates the spectator at a single point in the centre of the room, the point from which the observer’s space blends with that of the frescoed figures.

The realism of the perspective handling of the oculus made it the most influential illusionistic di sotto in su ceiling decoration of the early Renaissance. Its implications for the future of ceiling decoration were largely unrealized, however, until the time of Correggio, a major northern Italian painter of the early 16th century, who employed the same type of illusionism in a series of domes in Parma (Italy). Furthermore, the idea of total spatial illusion generated by Mantegna was not fully exploited until inventors of ingenious schemes of ceiling decoration in the Baroque era (the 17th century), such as Giovanni Lanfranco and Andrea Pozzo, utilized a basically identical concept of total illusion dependent upon the location of a hypothetical viewer standing at a single point in the room.

While at the Gonzaga court, Mantegna attained a position of great respect. His close relations with his patron Ludovico were a unique phenomenon at such an early date. As one might expect, the signatures of Mantegna’s paintings reveal intense pride in his accomplishments as a painter. Other than that there are only a few legal records of disputes with his neighbours (from which Ludovico had to rescue him) to provide tentative evidence for the painter’s irascible and contentious personality during his later years. An empathetic viewer may draw many subjective conclusions as to Mantegna’s thoughts and emotions by looking carefully at his paintings.

Ludovico died in 1478, followed soon after by Mantegna’s son Bernardino, who had been expected to carry on his father’s studio. Mantegna’s financial situation was so bad that, in 1484, he was forced to ask for help from the powerful Florentine merchant prince Lorenzo de’ Medici and even contemplated moving to Florence. But Ludovico’s son Federico outlived his father by only a few years, and, with the accession of young Francesco II in 1484, the financial conditions of patronage improved.

Though many of Mantegna’s works for the Gonzaga family were subsequently lost, the remains of nine canvases depicting a Roman triumphal procession, the Triumph of Caesar, begun about 1486 and worked on for several years, still exist. In these paintings, reflecting the classical tastes of his new patron, Francesco, Mantegna reached the peak of his late style. Perhaps it was this new imaginative synthesis of the colour, splendour, and ritualistic power of ancient Rome that brought about Pope Innocent VIII’s commission to decorate his private chapel in the Belvedere Palace in Rome (destroyed 1780), which Mantegna carried out in 1488–90.

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Notwithstanding ill health and advanced age, Mantegna worked intensively during the remaining years of his life. In 1495 Francesco ordered the Madonna of the Victory (1496) to commemorate his supposed victory at the Battle of Fornovo. In the last years of his life, Mantegna painted the Parnassus (1497), a picture celebrating the marriage of Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga in 1490, and Wisdom Overcoming the Vices (1502) for Isabella’s studiolo (a small room in the Gonzaga palace at Mantua embellished with fine paintings and carvings of mythological subjects intended to display the erudition and advanced taste of its patron). A third canvas intended for this program, with the legend of the god Comus, was unfinished when Mantegna died and was completed by his successor at the Gonzaga court, Lorenzo Costa.

A funerary chapel in the church of S. Andrea at Mantua was dedicated to Mantegna’s memory. Decorated with frescoes, including a dome painted (possibly by Correggio) with paradise symbols related to Mantegna’s Madonna of the Victory, it was finished in 1516. No other 15th-century artist was dignified by having a funerary chapel dedicated to him in the major church of the city where he worked, which attests to the high stature Mantegna came to enjoy in his adopted city.

Legacy

Mantegna’s art and his attitude toward Classical antiquity provided a model for other artists, among them Giovanni Bellini in Venice and Albrecht Dürer in Germany. By placing the Virgin and saints of the S. Zeno altarpiece in a unified space continuous with its frame, Mantegna introduced new principles of illusionism into sacra conversazione paintings (i.e., paintings of the Madonna and Child with saints).

Perhaps of even greater significance were his achievements in the field of fresco painting. Mantegna’s invention of total spatial illusionism by the manipulation of perspective and foreshortening began a tradition of ceiling decoration that was followed for three centuries. Mantegna’s portraits of the Gonzaga family in their palace at Mantua (1474) glorified living subjects by conferring upon them the over-life-size stature, sculptural volume, and studied gravity of movement and gesture normally reserved for saints and heroes of myth and history.