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Andrea Mantegna
Among the most idiosyncratic artists of the quattrocento,
Andrea Mantegna (1430/1431–1506) crafted a signature style of great
sophistication based on familiarity with classical antiquity. A gifted
painter and pioneering draftsman, Mantegna practiced a uniquely
crisp and sculptural interpretation of Renaissance precepts. These
attributes developed during Mantegna’s formative years in Padua,
a northern Italian center of humanist scholarship annexed by the
Venetian state in 1405.
Mantegna’s vocabulary of ancient motifs embodies the theories
of the Italian architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–
1472), whose treatises are the seminal theoretical writings on art
and architecture of the fifteenth century. Alberti’s concept of disegno,
which embraced rational compositional order, including an insistence
on sharply drawn forms, is the basis of central Italian art. Venetian
painting, upholding colore—the supremacy of color and animated
brushwork, often at the expense of form—developed in sharp contrast to this aesthetic.
Mantegna’s illustrious reputation would have brought him to the
attention of sixteenth-century Venetian masters even if he had not
been the brother-in-law of Giovanni Bellini, Venice’s leading artist
circa 1500. Mantegna’s work offered technical lessons in aggressive
perspective and his life served as an example of individual fame; both
would have struck a resonant chord with the great Venetian rivals of
the cinquecento.