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Updated: June 11, 2025
The truth is that Mantegna's inspiration was derived from the antique. The beauty of classical bas-relief entered deep into his soul and ruled his imagination. In later life he spent his acquired wealth in forming a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities.
In other pictures of his, the figures look as though cast of bronze, for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors of his own day, particularly by the Florentine Donatello, one of the geniuses of the early Renaissance. Mantegna's studies of form in sculpture made him an excellent draughtsman.
Mantegna's own genius has inspired this masterpiece, which tradition assigns to the medallist Sperando Maglioli. Whoever wrought it, must have felt the incubation of the mighty painter's spirit, and have striven to express in bronze the character of his uncompromising art.
It is significant that the subject and its treatment are so entirely classic as only to be appreciated by references to Latin literature. Another significance attaches to the Agony in the Garden above mentioned, which is one of the very earliest, as the Scipio is the very latest, of Mantegna's pictures, being painted before he left Padua to go to Mantua.
All that the traveller has to do is to leave the train at Padua overnight and he will be very glad to do so, for that last five-hour lap from Milan to Venice is very trying, with all the disentanglement of registered luggage at the end of it before one can get to the hotel and spend the next morning in exploring Padua's own riches: Giotto's frescoes in the Madonna dell'Arena; Mantegna's in the Eremitani; Donatello's altar in the church of Padua's own sweet Saint Anthony; and so forth; and then in the afternoon take the tram for Fusina.
These early painters have made up their Paganism for themselves, out of all pleasant things they knew; their fancy has brooded upon it; and the very details that make us laugh, the details coming direct from the Middle Ages, the spirit in glaring opposition occasionally to that of Antiquity, bring home to us how completely this Pagan fairyland is a genuine reality to these men. We feel this in nearly all the work of that sort least, in the archæological Mantegna's. We see it beginning in the mere single figures the various drawings of Orpheus, "Orpheus le doux menestrier jouant de flutes et de musettes," as Villon called him, much about that time piping or fiddling among little toy animals out of a Nuremberg box; the drawing of fauns carrying sheep, some with a queer look of the Good Shepherd about them, of Pinturicchio; and rising to such wonderful exhibitions (to me, with their obscure reminiscence of pageants, they always seem like ballets) as Perugino's Ceiling of the Cambio, where, among arabesqued constellations, the gods of antiquity move gravely along: the bearded knight Mars, armed cap-
Two of our pictures, the Richard II. diptych and the Edward VI. of Holbein, were in his collection, besides many we have mentioned, such as Holbein's 'Erasmus, Raphael's cartoons, and Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar. Before Charles came to the throne he had gone to Spain to woo the daughter of Philip III. The magnificent Titians in the palace at Madrid extorted such admiration from the Prince that Philip felt it incumbent upon him as a host and a Spaniard to offer some of them to Charles.
From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar, and the service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts the arts of arrested movement but its influence was to be seen also in the great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so important that large prints were made of them and published a fact which is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.
Sumner, however, said that he was sure that Giotto, with his temperament, could never have wrought detail with such exactness and refinement as did Mantegna but also, that Giotto's color would always have been far better than Mantegna's. The likeness between the two artists is the intense desire of each to render expression of thought and feeling.
There is something links things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make. I can't explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, that I am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond my merits.
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