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At all events, he became old Squarcione's favourite pupil. But when he was inside the studio, he found there a vast collection of antique fragments of sculpture, which the master had got together from all sources, and which the pupils were drawing. He was set to drawing them, too, as the best way of learning how to paint.
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.
His father and teacher was Jacopo Bellini, who had a school of painting in Padua and was the rival in that city of Squarcione, a scientific instructor who depended largely on casts from the antique to point his lessons. Squarcione's most famous pupil was Andrea Mantegna, who subsequently married Giovanni Bellini's sister and alienated his master.
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