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Updated: June 11, 2025
Yet even from the days when he copied Andrea Mantegna's struggling sea-monsters, or when he drew the stern matured warrior angels of his Apocalypse fighting, with their historied faces like men hardened by deceptions practised upon them, like men who have forbidden salt tears and clenched their teeth and closed their hearts, who see, who hate; even from these early days, the energy of his line was capable of all this, and his spontaneous sense of arabesque could become menacing and explosive.
The chapel painted in fresco for Innocent was ruthlessly destroyed by Pius VI.; and thus the world has lost one of Mantegna's masterpieces, executed while his genius was at its zenith. On his return to Mantua he finished the decorations of the Castello of the Gonzaghi, and completed his greatest surviving work, the "Triumph of Julius Caesar."
Yet he was a great leader and teacher in art, and the true proportions of his drawing are grand, if his colouring is harsh. I am happy to say that Mantegna's 'Triumph of Julius Cæsar' is in England at Hampton Court, having been bought from the Duke of Mantua by Charles I. These cartoons, nine in number, are sketches in water-colour or distemper on paper fixed on cloth.
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.
In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar.
One of his sons painted with his father, and, after Andrea Mantegna's death, completed some of his pictures. Andrea Mantegna's early study of antique sculpture moulded his whole life's work. He took great delight in modelling, in perspective, of which he made himself a master, and in chiaroscuro, or light and shade.
Francois asked him, as he placed his copy of Mantegna's figure in his portfolio. "Oh! no, that's merely a dip into innocence, a good lesson to teach one to be modest and sincere. Life is very different nowadays."
William of Orange gave the painter lodgings at Hampton Court, where it seems he painted the Labours of Hercules in chiaro-oscuro, and repaired Andrea Mantegna's pictures of the Triumphs of Julius Cæsar. The commissioners for rebuilding St. Paul's Cathedral unanimously chose Laguerre to decorate the cupola with frescoes.
Even Mantegna's influence was probably less the effect of a personal affinity than that through him a power streamed direct from the antique dawn. This great and master influence of those days was more one of hope, indefinite, incomprehensible, visionary, than one of knowledge and assured discovery. Raphael may have received it from Duerer, as well as Duerer from Bellini.
The masonry is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the side or cupola of a church becomes a rent in the clouds, streaming with light.
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