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And Mantegna makes other distinctions in the field common to both of them. Murder, for him, did not essentially subsist in its shocking suddenness; it held something more specific, a witchery of its own, a macabre fascination, a mystery. Lionardo felt it when he drew his Medusa; Shelley wrote it down "the tempestuous loveliness of terror."
It is not as a religious artist that he takes his rank, but as having powerfully promoted the rehabilitation of the body achieved for art by the Renaissance. Unlike Mantegna, Signorelli never entered the service of a prince, though we have seen that he executed commissions for Lorenzo de' Medici and Pandolfo Petrucci.
Between Mantua, Goito, and Buscoldo, Mantegna spent the last forty-six years of his life in continual employment, broken only by a short visit to Florence in 1466, and another to Bologna in 1472, and by a longer residence in Rome between the years 1488 and 1490. During the latter period Innocent VIII. was Pope.
The gallery had been formed by Cardinal Giulio Albertinelli at a time when the taste for Guido and Caraccio, now fallen, had predominated. His ancestor had taken pleasure in gathering the works of the school of Bologna. But he would show to Madame Martin several paintings which had not displeased Miss Bell, among others a Mantegna.
Mantegna, a few miles distant, at Padua, was working out his ideal of severely classical design. Yet he scarcely touched the manner of the Venetians with his influence, though Gian Bellini was his brother-in-law and pupil, and though his genius, in grasp of matter and in management of composition, soared above his neighbours.
Mantegna, the pupil of the ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of Donatello, studies for his paintings not from nature, but from sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background; despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece, they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike hair and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies, clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture.
The antique never' directly influenced the Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system of modelled, colourless form; the men who saw form only through the medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters display comparatively little antique influence.
Both these temptations should be resolutely resisted by the student who is capable of discerning different kinds of excellence and diverse titles to affectionate remembrance. Tracing the history of Italian painting is like pursuing a journey down an ever-broadening river, whose affluents are Giotto and Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, and Mantegna.
It was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace.
Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the Gonzagas and their Mantua.
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