Andrea Mantegna
1431 - 1506
Kevin J. Benoy
Andrea Mantegna
• Mantegna is often seen
as the most important
painter of the early
Renaissance after
Masaccio.
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.
Virgin & Child by Squarcione
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.
St. Sebastian
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nude preliminary study
St. James on his way to execution.
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.
Andrea Mantegna
• Mantegna was
fascinated by the
possibilities that
perspective offered.
• He employed the socalled “worm’s eye”
perspective to give an
unusual viewpoint in
many of his works.
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.
Finis