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Along the wall here are the nine large tempera pictures by Mantegna "one of the chief heroes in the advance of painting in Italy" in which are represented "The Triumph of Cæsar". Says Mr.
Beginning, as we have pointed out, with sacred subjects, Rubens soon turned to the study of the classics, and found in them not so much the classical severity that Mantegna had sought for as the pagan spirit of fulness and freedom.
This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediæval, the modern mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture hampering painting.
Goethe was urbane to Francia, "a very respectable artist"; he was astonished at Mantegna, "one of the older painters," but accepted him as leading up to Titian: and so "thus was art developed after the barbarous period." But Goethe had the sweeping sublimity of youth with him.
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.
The gallery had been formed by Cardinal Giulio Albertinelli at a time when the taste for Guido and Caraccio, now fallen, had predominated. His ancestor had taken pleasure in gathering the works of the school of Bologna. But he would show to Madame Martin several paintings which had not displeased Miss Bell, among others a Mantegna.
Andrea Mantegna, the great painter and engraver, who made the final step in the development of pictorial art in Italy, was a shepherd's son, like Giotto, born about one hundred years after Giotto's death. Similar conditions and a similar bent of genius produced different results in different centuries.
Carlo Crivelli was another master of the fifteenth century who deserves notice. He had strong individuality, yet was influenced by the Paduan and Venetian Schools. He displayed an old-fashioned preference for painting in tempera. Sometimes his drawing approaches that of Mantegna, while he has a gorgeousness of colouring all his own.
Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time a camelopard. Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua.
Instead of a harmless sheep, which, in Mantegna, is walking by the side of the foremost elephant, Rubens has introduced a lion and a lioness, which growl angrily at the elephant. The latter is looking furiously round, and is on the point of striking the lion a blow with his trunk."
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