Exhibitions
Andrea Mantegna: Painter, Draughtsman and Printmaker of the Italian Renaissance (Royal Academy, till 5 April)
Exquisite conundrum
Roderick Conway Morris
Aidrea Mantegna received extrava- gant praise throughout his life. After his death artists as diverse as Durer, Rem- brandt, Burne-Jones and Degas drew direct inspiration from him. Yet of all the great Italian Renaissance artists he is now the least understood, the least popularly esteemed. As to why this should be, the Royal Academy's excellent exhibition, the first large international show of Mantegna for 30 years, suggests some answers and offers a welcome opportunity to see the artist anew.
Born the son of a carpenter in about 1431 near Padua, Mantegna was appren- ticed to the studio of Francesco Squar- cione; a talentless painter himself, Squarcione did, however, possess a large collection of drawings, fragments of sculp- ture and friezes, and objets d'art. Padua, with its ancient university and pre- eminence in legal, medical and literary studies, was one of the powerhouses of the Renaissance, and whilst Mantegna never became a varsity man, his artistic flair, intelligence and wit opened the academic world to him. He also brought an artist's eye to Roman sculpture and architecture, gaining a reputation as a connoisseur and antiquarian. Before long Mantegna's intel- lectual friends were penning eulogies to their protégé. Following a court battle, he extracted himself from Squarcione's studio, recording for posterity what he thought of his erstwhile mentor by depicting him in a fresco as a pot-bellied executioner.
Conventional wisdom would have it that a wide social and intellectual gulf existed between Renaissance scholars and book- men, who were often patrician, and their usually humbly-born, paint- and plaster- spattered artist-craftsmen contemporaries. In fact, the ambitious enterprise of recover- ing and reviving, even surpassing, all that was best in the ancient world was very much a joint enterprise demanding con- stant interchange and co-operation between scholars, artists and architects.
Hence the enthusiasm with which Padua greeted Mantegna's appearance: here was an artist of wonderful abilities, perfectly in tune with the most advanced thinking of the times, and capable of realising in picto- The Musicians', c.1484-92, canvas VIII of Mantegna's series The Triumphs of Caesar rial form the complex counter-currents, such as adulation of the pagan world together with Christian piety, which that thinking embraced. But this may also be why, whereas a cultivated 15th-century observer seeing a Mantegna might have revelled in its up-to-date classical sculp- tural elements and use of perspective and been impressed by the subtlety and accura- cy of the human figure drawing whilst exer- cised by the arcane decorative and symbolic touches, the modern viewer can feel himself in the presence of a beautiful, exquisitely wrought conundrum.
A further stumbling block is that many of Mantegna's paintings were done in distem- per, which gave the sharpness, purity and clarity of colour and definition he sought, and made the picture observable from every angle without reflecting the light If pictures in distemper are varnished, the colours suffer darkening and blurring and the work is irreparably damaged. Most of Mantegna's paintings have, alas, suffered this fate at one time or another, and it is a revelation to see those few pictures that escaped. Some extremely delicate rescue operations have been carried out of late, and consequently some others are now closer than they have been for generations to what they once were. Mantegna also used tempera but resisted oil, finding it perhaps too heavy a medium for, in the words of Keith Christiansen in the com- mendable catalogue, 'the almost tenifying precision of his brushwork'.
In other respects Mantegna was a tireless innovator: he took up engraving, then in its infancy, not to mass-produce but to explore the artistic possibilities of the technique. Cutting the copper plates himself, through trial and error he raised it to an entirely new plane of expressiveness and finesse. His grisailles, or monochrome pictures, achieved a never-to-be-surpassed plasticity and tonality. His penetrating portraits broke new ground, though his 'warts and all' approach did not please some of his subjects, notably his notoriously vain young patroness Isabella d'Este.
The final room contains nine vast panels, The Triumphs of Caesar, executed in Man- tua, where Mantegna spent most of his working life as court painter to the Gonza- gas (the series was later bought by Charles I and happily not sold off, like many other works, by Cromwell). Mantegna regarded these as his chef d'oeuvre, completing them on the eve of his death in 1506. They have suffered as much from the ravages of igno- rant and incompetent restoration as from time. More recent treatment has removed many of these accretions, allowing the orig- inal colours to glow forth again through the veil of faded grandeur, and bringing to life once more this trumpet-blowing, banner- waving, booty-bearing multitude of men and beasts — a whole city, empire, civilisa- tion captured on canvas.
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