andrea mantegna 1431 - 1506 kevin j. benoy. andrea mantegna mantegna is often seen as the most...
TRANSCRIPT
Andrea Mantegna1431 - 1506
Kevin J. Benoy
Andrea Mantegna
• Mantegna is often seen as the most important painter of the early Renaissance after Masaccio.
Andrea Mantegna• He was adopted at 10 years
of age by the painter Francesco Squarcione.
• He became an established master of his own workshop at age 17.
• He was determined not to allow his adopted father to continue profiting from his talent.
• The two fought many legal battles.Virgin & Child by Squarcione
Andrea Mantegna
• Like Squarcione, Mantegna loved classical antiquities.
• His paintings consciously integrated antique forms.
• He helped spark general public interest in the ancient Roman world.
St. Sebastian
Andrea Mantegna• In 1459 he moved to
Mantua, where he worked for the Gonzaga family.
• They were great patrons of art and this guaranteed a steady income for the rest of his life.
• However, they were not particularly attractive subjects to paint.
Andrea Mantegna• His “Camera degli
Sposi” (Wedding Chamber) involved the painting of walls and ceilings to create the illusion of an open-air pavilion. This room foreshadowed later baroque interest in illusory work – more than a century before it became common.
Andrea Mantegna
• The painted occulus contained a joke that must have amused his sponsor no end.
• Diaperless cherubim perch precariously around its rim, while a tenuously balanced painted planter looks likely to fall on whoever stands beneath it.
Andrea Mantegna• His frescoes in Padua, at the
Church of the Eremitani, were lost forever – destroyed in a war-time explosion in 1944.
• They no exist only in reproductions and in a surviving preliminary sketch – the earliest such study we know of.
• It proves that, like Masaccio, Mantegna sketched the nude form first, adding clothes later.
Nude preliminary study
St. James on his way to execution.
Andrea Mantegna
• Mantegna took a keen interest in the new technique of mathematical perspective.
• His Dead Christ shocked viewers with its brutal realism, achieved by foreshortening.
Andrea Mantegna
• Mantegna was fascinated by the possibilities that perspective offered.
• He employed the so-called “worm’s eye” perspective to give an unusual viewpoint in many of his works.
Andrea Mantegna
• He also employed an interesting diagonal composition in the traditional Virgin & Child image.
• It is precisely this drive to innovate which makes him an important Renaissance painter.
Finis