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                                                                                ART, Page 70

A Genius Obsessed By Stone


Taking classical sculpture as his model, Mantegna populated the
new world of the Renaissance

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Andrea Mantegna has never been easy to approach, alive or
dead. The "rock-born giant," as Bernard Berenson called him,
with his dedication to archaeology and his obsession with
empirical vision, was one of the quintessential artists of the
early Italian Renaissance. He was innovative, flinty and
tough-minded, without an iota of sentiment.

    This son of a Paduan carpenter, who rose to become the
cynosure of every humanist eye in northern Italy, once sent a
gang of thugs to bash up a printer who fell foul of him, and
then had the poor man denounced for sodomy -- a crime that, in
15th century Venice, carried the death penalty. Mantegna could
also be sardonic and disrespectful to tardy patrons, up to and
including the Pope himself. When Innocent VIII hired him to
decorate the chapel of the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican, he
was puzzled to see, tacked onto allegorical roundels of the
Seven Virtues, an eighth that held the sketched-in figure of an
old woman. What did she signify? asked the Pontiff.
"Ingratitude," snapped Mantegna, who had not yet been paid.

    You must go to his work; most of it cannot come to you --
not the murals and not many of the paintings either, most of
which are now considered too frail to travel. Neither the St.
Luke Altarpiece nor The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, that
unsurpassably bitter and poignant image of the corpse on the
stone slab, can leave the Brera in Milan, and the Louvre will
never lend the Madonna della Vittoria to another museum.

    Consequently there is a lengthy list of major paintings
that are not included in "Andrea Mantegna," the show of more
than 130 works by him and others that will be at the Royal
Academy of Arts in London through early April before moving to
New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in May. But this
should deter no one -- any chance to see a number of Mantegnas
together ought to be grabbed, and this show is more a scholarly
one than a spectacle, with catalog essays that break new ground
in Mantegna research.

    The word classicist today suggests pedantry. To the best
minds of the Italian Renaissance it meant discovery and
impassioned curiosity. We are too hobbled by provincialism in
time to be able to goad ourselves into the excitement with which
Mantegna and other Italian artists, architects and writers of
the 15th century confronted the Antique: a buried civilization,
an Atlantis below the hills and vineyards. What did it mean when
Mantegna, in the early autumn of 1464, took off with two friends
on a boat decked with carpets and laurel branches, punting
around Lake Garda, twangling on the lute and looking for Roman
ruins? This search for "such delightful places and such
venerable ancient monuments," as one of them later wrote, was
a serious idyll, a way back into the past.

    To be esteemed as a painter was to be compared with lost
and mythic artists: Parrhasios, Zeuxis and Apelles. Mantegna's
taste for emblems and learned allegory -- the mark of superior
imagination among Italian humanists -- pervades the work he did
at Isabella d'Este's prompting, such as the fantastically
elaborate scene of Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden
of Virtue.

    The most visible and palpable form of the Antique was
stone. Sculpture afforded the model for painting, and Mantegna
took its implications much further. Time and again, his
paintings look like renderings of actual stone bas-reliefs,
trompe l'oeil records of a scene carved by some imaginary dead
hand. The figures and tent of Judith with the Head of
Holofernes, circa 1495-1500, are painted with matte gray gouache
on fine linen, but they seem at first glimpse to be actual
stone. So little in art is new: what Mantegna was doing with
this play of illusion was not so far from the wood graining and
stencils in Georges Braque's Cubist paintings more than 400
years later.

    As a result, the image hovers strangely between the
inorganic, mineral fixity of stone and the fluid life of paint.
The banner on its pole outside the tent and the whipping linear
rhythms of Judith's head ribbon seem blown by an actual wind.
And the undercurrent of strangeness is increased by the way
Mantegna reduces Holofernes to two anatomical fragments: his
head, which the avenging Jewess is placing in a bag, and the
sole of his foot, which sticks up above the horizon of the bed
end. Mantegna had a liking for feet -- the same dead soles
confront your eye in the most famous of his images, The
Lamentation over the Dead Christ. His willingness to emphasize
single parts of the body in this weirdly iconic way is a
reminder that, like any other artist of the time, he experienced
antiquity mainly in fragments: broken parts and details of the
huge lost whole.

    The nature of stone goes straight into Mantegna's formal
system. It is hard and precise, never atmospheric: he has none
of the mellowness of his relative Giovanni Bellini. None of his
shapes are fudged or merely alluded to. You see every pebble and
crack in the rocks, and of course every line of expression on
the human face; in his Portrait of a Man, circa 1470-75, the
folds of the red costume have the density of marble, the eyes
are gray agate, and the net of lines around them and on the
brow is described down to the point where it merges with the
craquelure of the paint itself.

    Indeed, some of his greatest works were produced by the
scribing of metal by metal -- the engravings. For it was
Mantegna who invented the print as a fine-art form. Up to about
1460 it had been treated mainly as a minor reproductive medium
for the dissemination of images. But Mantegna made prints into
a prime vehicle of his imagination. Impressions of his
engravings in good condition are now extremely rare, but in the
full richness of their tonal contrast they have the virile
directness of Donatello's sculpture.

    It was through engravings, above all, that Mantegna was
able to reimagine classical motifs in all their grief,
exaltation and lust. The satyr clutching the drunken boy in his
Bacchanal with a Wine Vat has to be the sharpest and least
prudish image of homosexual desire in all Renaissance art. The
mountainous folds of skirt in Mantegna's engraving of the Virgin
and Child, arguably the most beautiful print made by any Italian
during the Renaissance and only to be rivaled by Durer, support
a protective gesture of inexpressible tenderness, in which the
Madonna seems to be drawing her son back into the cave of her
own body.

    Such prints are Mantegna undiluted, and it is worth
keeping them in mind when one moves to the series of paintings
that were considered his crowning achievement, of an importance
comparable only to Raphael's cartoons -- the Triumphs of Caesar,
made for the Marchese Francesco Gonzaga in the 1490s. Painted
in tempera on linen, abused over the centuries by intrusive
restorers, these are ghosts of their former selves; but
tremendous ghosts they remain. Their story is a victory parade
by Caesar through Rome, preceded by soldiers, trophies and
bearers of loot. Into them Mantegna poured all his antiquarian
passions. They became a visual encyclopedia of what the
Renaissance knew about the rituals, costumes and artifacts of
Rome.

    Through the overpainting and damage, you can still glimpse
Mantegna's original intent in the better-preserved works, like
The Vase Bearers, showing the Herculean man in the blue cloak
striding forward with a giant vessel on his shoulder, as
described by Plutarch, and the ethereal beauty of a blond youth
who seems to be decking the white ox for sacrifice. As a tribute
to the power of Roman civilization, this great frieze must have
surpassed any painting that the ancient Romans themselves could
do.