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Mantegna accepted the invitation; but numerous engagements prevented him from transferring his household from Padua to Mantua until the year 1460. From that date onwards to 1506, when he died, Mantegna remained attached to the Gonzaga family serving three Marquises in succession, and adorning their palaces, chapels, and country-seats with frescoes now, alas! almost entirely ruined.
Having, therefore, gone to Mantua to seek out Mantegna, who was then working in that city, he exerted himself in such a manner, being fired by the fame of his instructor, that no long time passed before Francesco II, Marquis of Mantua, who found an extraordinary delight in painting, took him into his own service; and in the year 1487 he gave him a house for his habitation in Mantua, and assigned him an honourable provision.
Mantegna painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre.
Illuminations and rejoicings made the piazza of St. Mark in Venice gay, and Francesco da Gonzaga had the glorious Madonna della Vittoria painted for him by Mantegna, in commemoration of what ought only to have been remembered with shame.
The verses she received on that theme would have made a Theseid, those she had to hear would have kept the rhapsodists for a twelve-month, those she saw the very Sala del Consiglio could not have contained. Mantegna has her armoured, with greaves to the knee and spiked cups on her breastplate.
Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a house, and painted it within and without the latter one of the first examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese, regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air of Northern Italy.
Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo dei Barbari the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to study the proportions of the human body a study which henceforth became the most absorbing interest of his life. "I was four years absent from Nuremberg," he records, "and then my father recalled me.
In both of these the influence of his famous brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, is traceable, the former being till lately attributed to him. Both Giovanni and Gentile worked in Padua, where Mantegna was established, in 1460 or thereabouts, and where another influence, that of the sculptor Donatello, must have had its effect on the young brothers.
During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective. From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at length in the next chapter.
He led the way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode would not go beyond a si crede in attributing to him.
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