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By the 10th of August she was able to start on her journey, and spent a night on the way at Canneto with her kinswoman, Antonia del Balzo, wife of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Bozzolo, who came to meet her with two beautiful daughters. "Messer Andrea Mantegna himself," exclaimed the marchioness, "could not paint fairer maidens!"
The painter's severe taste keeps out of sight the insolence and orgies of the empire; he conceives Rome as Shakspeare did in "Coriolanus." In compositions of this type, studied after bas-reliefs and friezes, Mantegna displayed a power that was unique.
Guardi's picture of S. Giorgio Maggiore in the Accademia, No. 707, shows us that the earlier campanile, which fell in 1774, was higher and slenderer than the present one. We now come to Room XVII, which has a number of small interesting works, some by great masters. Mantegna is here with a S. George, which I reproduce on the opposite page. Very beautiful it is, both in feeling and colour.
A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in time, is in the National Gallery. When Mantegna was sixty years old he took up the art of engraving, and prosecuted it with zeal and success, being one of the earliest painters who engraved his own pictures, and this accomplishment spread them abroad a hundredfold.
Nobody calls Mantegna a pedant nowadays; yet one might say against him most of the things that have been said against Poussin. But Mantegna lived in a century that we like, and Poussin in one that we dislike.
For the rest, we find in Perugino, far more than in either Mantegna or Signorelli, an instance of the simple Italian craftsman, employing numerous assistants, undertaking contract work on a large scale, and striking keen bargains with his employers.
Still earlier, Mantegna supplied a series of idealised Pompeian figures exquisitely composed, set in a lacy fancy of airy architectural detail, in which he idealised all the gods of Olympus. Each fair young goddess, each strong and perfect god, stood in its particular niche and indicated its penchant by a tripod, a peacock, an apple or a caduceus, as clue to the proper name.
To render the specific character of each plant with greater precision would be impossible. See the series of anatomical studies of the horse in the Royal Collection. Engraved by Edelinck. The drawing has obvious Lionardesque qualities; but how far it may be from the character of the original we can guess by Rubens' transcript from Mantegna.
In his absolute sincerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard and rugged types, scorning to introduce an element of beauty, whether sensuous or ideal, that should distract him from the study of the body in and for itself. This distinguishes him in the arabesques at Orvieto alike from Mantegna and Michael Angelo, from Correggio and Raphael, from Titian and Paolo Veronese.
Yet enough remain to show us that Duerer was not a painter born, in the sense that Titian and Correggio or Rembrandt and Rubens are; nay, not even in the sense that a Jan Van Eyck or a Mantegna is.
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