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For it is just in the last refinement of touch of a Raphael drawing or the rapid and expressive outline of a Mantegna that we find the analogy between the two arts, in a refinement of touch which is lost on the public, and appreciated only by the practiced student either of music or painting. This final attainment of the hand is only possible to a man who has been trained as a boy to his work.
Far away on our left, as we drove towards Padua, it rose above the little town that crawled to the foot of the castle's hill to beg protection; and it was exactly like a city painted by Mantegna or Carpaccio, Mr. Barrymore said. Up the hill ran the noblest and biggest wall that an Old Master's imagination could have conceived.
At any rate, Finiguerra took the hint, it is said, and made an impression on paper, rolling it, as one would do with an etching or engraving. In the Silver Chamber in the Pitti Palace is a Pax, by Mantegna, made in the same way as that by Finiguerra, and bearing comparison with it. The engraving is most delicate, and it is difficult to imagine a better specimen of the art.
No doubt, to judge by some old pictures such as those of the renowned Mantegna, there must have been a time when men thought long hair in children rather beautiful than otherwise. And I am not so rigorous as to deny a certain charm to these portraits a charm which is largely due I fancy, to the becoming costumes of the period. At the same time "
Guido cared more for rare engravings and etchings than for pictures, and a few very fine framed prints stood on the big writing table; there was Dürer's Melancholia, and the Saint Jerome, and the Little White Horse, and the small Saint Anthony, and Rembrandt's Three Trees, all by itself, as the most wonderful etching in the world deserved to be; and here and there, about the room, were a few good engravings by Martin Schöngauer, and by Mantegna, and by Marcantonio Raimondi.
Here wandered the apprentice-boy Mantegna, poor and humble, stealing timidly in behind the furred gowns and the gilded chains to feast his poor little artist-soul upon the frightened young Madonnas and wide-eyed angels that look out timidly from the arches of the sepulchres.
He had turned his back on the Venus de' Medici, and with his arms resting on the rail-mug which protects the pictures, and his head buried in his hands, he was lost in the contemplation of that superb triptych of Andrea Mantegna a work which has neither the material splendour nor the commanding force of some of its neighbours, but which, glowing there with the loveliness of patient labour, suits possibly a more constant need of the soul.
It is as though Mantegna had been called to paint a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid their various occupations, and preserved for centuries from injury in some Egyptian solitude of dewless sand. In spite of this unearthly immobility, the Paduan frescoes exercise a strange and potent spell.
ANDREA MANTEGNA was born at Vicenza in 1431, and when no more than ten years old was inscribed in the guild of Padua as pupil and adopted son of Squarcione. As early as 1448 he had painted an altar-piece for Santa Sophia, now lost, and in 1452 the fresco in San Antonio.
There has always been something of a mystery about the picture, and you must not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did not paint it at all. Such changes in the attributions of unsigned paintings are not uncommon. One of the greatest pioneer artists of the fifteenth century was Andrea Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy.
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