United States or Lebanon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Indeed, it is known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua.

The Cathedral of San Pietro was restored from his designs and in the Church of San Andrea, in a tomb adorned by his pupils, sleeps the great Mantegna. The history of music at the court of Mantua begins at least as early as the fourteenth century. Vander Straeten found some record of a musician of the Gallo-Belgic school called Jean le Chartreux, or by the Italians Giovanni di Namur.

He walked about the studio, no longer vexed at finding models weakened by concessions to middle-class taste; he even felt tolerant with regard to that hideous bust. But, all at once, he came across a copy that Chaine had made at the Louvre, a Mantegna, which was marvellously exact in its dryness. 'Oh, the brute, he muttered, 'it's almost the original; he's never done anything better than that.

Yet here am I who have given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who have violated its tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle, bone, and artery; who have sucked its very soul from the pages of poets and humanists; who have wept and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled and doubted with AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed to its source the least inspiration of the masters, and groped in neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding tendrils of the arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell you that I stand abashed and ignorant before the mystery of this picture.

Again, Mantegna is not so dependent on line as Duerer nearly the whole of whose surface is produced by hatching with the brush point. These facts may, perhaps, account for the large portion of Duerer's time devoted to engraving. As an engraver he early found a style for himself, which he continued to develop to the end of his life.

It is a different school of painting altogether that we see in the Piazzetta of Canaletto , perhaps the last picture painted by a Venetian in the gallery. Andrea Mantegna was born, not at Padua, where his greatest work is to be found three frescoes in the Eremitani but at Vicenza.

Mantegna, the learned, the archæological, the pagan, who renounces his times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions.

One was that I enjoyed the Odyssey. "Am I a hypocrite?" I asked myself. I do not find old painters to be as incompatible as old authors. On the contrary, my experience has been that they are the reverse. I greatly prefer a canvas by Botticelli, Mantegna, El Greco or Velazquez to a modern picture.

Whether at Venice or elsewhere, it would seem almost necessary that the young painter had seen and been impressed by pictures by Gentile Bellini and Andrea Mantegna, both of whom have painted in the same thin tempera on fine canvas, obtaining similar beauties of colour and surface. It is hardly possible to imagine one who had seen none but German or Flemish pictures painting the St. Sebastian.

The Mantegna, so naively harsh in treatment, looked like some faded coloured print nailed there for the delectation of simple-minded folk; whilst the minutely painted stove, all awry, hanging beside the gingerbread Christ absolving the adulterous woman, assumed an unexpectedly gay aspect.