Recent Native American Art || Andrea Mantegnaby Jane Martineau; Suzanne Boorsch; Keith Christiansen; David Ekserdjian; Charles Hope; David Landau

Andrea Mantegna by Jane Martineau; Suzanne Boorsch; Keith Christiansen; David Ekserdjian;Charles Hope; David LandauReview by: Wendy Stedman SheardArt Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3, Recent Native American Art (Autumn, 1992), pp. 85+87+89+91-93Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777353 .

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With artists whose literary output is integral to their visual work, the successful inclusion in an exhibition of this aspect of their oeuvre is always difficult. Because Carrington's significant literary achievements ran parallel to her artistic production, some integration is vital. Therefore, it was a wise move to place, at the beginning of the exhibition, a case containing beautifully bound first-edition copies of her Surrealist texts, including the legendary Down Be- low.9 Although quotations from her published texts were used in the installation, a few more would have helped to reinforce the

relationship between the two modes of artistic expression.

The inclusion of two textiles, filled with Greek and Egyptian references, ap- peared almost as an afterthought and left one wondering how they were connected to the rest of her work. Similarly, although Carrington has worked in sculpture throughout her career, this provocative and

important area of her output was meagerly presented by four bronzes, twin castings of the same two pieces at that.

Doubly marginalized both as a woman and as a Mexican artist, Carrington has only just begun to receive the critical attention she is due. This exhibition and, even more, its catalogue do much to reorient Car-

rington scholarship and to challenge future

investigators. o

Notes 1. Palantine Predella is courtesy George Nadar Gallery, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Tuesday is in the collection of Isaac Lif, courtesy George Nadar Gallery, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 2. Quoted in an exhibition wall label. 3. For a thorough discussion of Varo and Carrington's rela-

tionship, and of Carrington's work as well, see Whitney Chadwick, WomenArtists and theSurrealist Movement (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 4. Edward J. Sullivan, La Mujer en Mexico/Women in Mex- ico (Mexico City: Centro Cultural, 1990), lxxi. 5. In the collection of the Charles B. Goddard Center for Visual and Performing Arts, Ardmore, Oklahoma. 6. Gloria Orenstein was one of the first to explore Mother Goddess imagery in Ca'rrington's work; see, for example, "Leonora Carrington's Visionary Art for the New Age," Chrysalis 3 (1978): 65-77. 7. A catalogue was published in conjunction with this exhibition but I have not yet seen a copy.

8. Curated by Edward J. Sullivan, this exhibition opened in 1990 at the National Academy of Design in New York and

subsequently traveled to the Centro Cultural/Arte Contem-

poraneo, Mexico City, in the winter of 1991, and to the Museo de Monterrey in the spring of 1991. 9. Leonora Carrington's short novel Down Below, dictated

in French to Jeanne Megnen in 1943, chronicles her descent into madness and subsequent incarceration in and escape from a mental asylum in Santander, Spain.

SUSAN A BERTH received her MA.from the Institute

of Fine Arts, New York University, and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Andrea Mantegna WENDY STEDMAN SHEARD

Jane Martineau, ed.; Suzanne Boorsch, Keith Christiansen, David Ekserdjian, Charles Hope, David Landau, and others. Andrea Mantegna. London and New York: Royal Academy of Arts and the Metropolitan Mu- seum ofArt, 1992. Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, New York. 510 pp.; 100 color ills., 231 black-and-white. $65.00; $39.50 paper

Exhibition schedule: Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 17-April 5, 1992; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 5-July 12, 1992

lthough Andrea Mantegna (Italian, ca. 1430-1506) is celebrated in art history for astonishing feats of illu-

sionism that anticipated such future devel- opments as Correggio's dramatic domes or the fictive architectural framework of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, this artist's life and art merit close attention for their own sake. Mantegna's career illus- trates important facets of both art and artistic biography of the early Renaissance in Italy. This exhibition and its richly detailed, informative catalogue offer a golden opportunity to engage his work.1

Mantegna, the son of a carpenter, received his artistic education in the early 1440s in Padua. At that time Alberti's new art theories, as well as revolutionary art- works by such Florentine artists as Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, and Do- natello were being produced there and in nearby Venice. The earliest collections of antiques, including pieces that were mere fragments-stimulating the imaginative reconstruction of the whole that Mantegna later carried to undreamed of lengths- were beginning to be used by artists as visual sources. In 1448 Mantegna broke off relations with his first teacher, Francesco Squarcione, whose influence on the art scene in Padua stemmed, to some extent, from his collection of ancient stone fragments and casts of classical sculptures. Mantegna then gravitated to the Venetian workshop of Jacopo Bellini, whose daughter Niccolosia he married in 1452. His early exposure to fervent investigations into the literary and political culture of ancient Rome, which humanists and teachers in Padua were undertaking, no doubt stimu- lated his lifelong passionate involvement with this field of inquiry. Mantegna's friend- ships with men who pursued literature and rhetoric marked him at an early date as an artist whose intellectual and social ambi-

tions drove him to reject the traditional artist-as-artisan concept. His artistic gifts led him to create a unique visualization of ancient Rome that fired the imaginations of contemporaries and prompted their praise of his ingegno (innate inventive talent, akin to the modemrn conception of genius), of his ability to reconstruct a scene from Roman life al naturale (as if from life), and of the depth of his archaeological knowledge, from which lifelike reconstructions could be built without constraining him to obey a canon of archaeological "correctness."

All but one of Mantegna's nine canvas panels that depict the Triumph of Caesar (cats. 108-15), a series that contemporaries considered his highest achievement in the area of antique revival, were on view in London. Regrettably, these fragile paintings, which date from the 1490s through the early years of the sixteenth century, did not travel to New York. How sensational they must have seemed when new can scarcely be credited when they are encountered in the Orangery at Hampton Court Palace, their permanent location. In this exhibition, however, the Triumphs, displayed in a hand- some, blue-gray architectural framework built especially for the occasion, were thrillingly brought back to life. Large (ap- proximately nine feet square), the canvases were aligned in a closely spaced row, sepa- rated by pilasterlike elements, resembling the installation in the Gonzaga Palace of San Sebastiano, Mantua, in 1506, the year of Mantegna's death. With a shrewd deploy- ment of theatrics, dramatic spot lighting in the current exhibition transformed these battered canvases into the sole sources of light and color in the exhibition's final room, providing a climactic focus for the dark, cavernous hall. Bleacher-style seats placed opposite the row of canvases held enthralled spectators who, though they spoke in hushed tones, otherwise evoked the audi- ences at Renaissance tableaux vivants or pageants watching fancifully adorned wagons. Along with the monumental classical reliefs, triumphal arches, and other relics of antiquity that Mantegna had seen during his stay in Rome between 1488 and 1490, theatrical performances at the Gonzaga court also must have inspired these works with their vivid, colorful, and animated reincarnation of Roman triumphal spectacle. Mantegna's last patron, Francesco Gonzaga, grandson of Ludovico Gonzaga, the ruler who had persuaded him to come to Mantua in 1460 as court artist, echoed the contemporary consensus on the excellence of the Triumphs when he called

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them "alive and breathing, so that the subject seems not to be represented, but actually to exist" (pp. 350-51), singling out the very quality of lifelike immediacy that was especially prized by consumers of visual art toward the end of the fifteenth century.

This exhibition provides the first opportunity since the exhibition that was held in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua just over thirty years ago to examine a broad selection of paintings, drawings, and prints by, or closely associated with, this major Re- naissance artist.2 Both the exhibition and the catalogue are organized according to mixed criteria: chronology (early work, late devotional images); subjects (the Descent into Limbo [a special focus in London because of the presence there of Giovanni Bellini's painting of that subject from Bris- tol and Mantegna's comparable one lent by the Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection], mythological and classical themes); pictorial type (monochrome paintings that imi- tate marble reliefs [which are termed, rather misleadingly, "grisailles"]); and individual programs (Isabella d'Este's Studiolo).

Comparison of works on view in Lon- don with those in the exhibition in Mantua of a generation ago demonstrates that only minor changes have occurred in our notion of Mantegna's artistic personality. Cu- mulatively, they underscore a claim that the traditional practices of art history- methods such as connoisseurship, contex- tual analysis, and examination of the social conditions of artists' lives-have yielded satisfactory results in the continuing study of this major Renaissance artist. The most dramatic revelations about his work derive from recent investigation into distemper, a pictorial technique that Mantegna experi- mented with and subsequently developed as his preferred medium.

With respect to the drawings in the exhibition, five of the seven that were in the 1961 exhibition and attributed to Mantegna were included, but of these only one, Bird on a Branch (cat. 72), retains its attribution to Mantegna. Two highly important drawings from Mantegna's Paduan period, St. James Led to Execution (cat. 11) and Four Saints (cat. 14), which may have been a final design for the left wing of Mantegna's high altarpiece for San Zeno in Verona of 1456-59, were attributed in the 1961 show to Giovanni Bellini. Mantegna's authorship of St. James Led to Execution now seems beyond doubt; the status of the very different Four Saints is less secure, despite the fact that new ways of thinking about the pur- poses and functions of drawing encourage acceptance of a greater diversity of style within Mantegna's autograph production. David Ekserdjian's thoughtful entries on

two quite different versions of Mantegna's Descent into Limbo (cats. 65 and 66) typify the new sophistication that demands evalua- tion of several different variables when con- sidering the attribution of drawings. Yet he missed the fact that cat. 119, The Elephants, which he describes as a drawing, is actually a print. Even more disturbing, cats. 104-7, four black chalk studies for portraits (pos- sibly, in fact, one or more of them are independent portrait drawings) cannot conceivably be by Mantegna. Their scale, conception, and handling of the medium are unrelated to any drawings that are plausibly attributed to him, nor are these heads simi- lar in any aspect of conception or execution to such authentic Mantegna painted portraits as Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan in the

Gemaildegalerie, Berlin (cat. 100), and the Portrait of a Man from the Uffizi, Florence (cat. 102). Their shaky attribution throws into question the conceptual validity of the portraiture section of the exhibition, since the drawings constitute a considerable por- tion of it. Viewers might have learned valu- able lessons about various problems that are presented by early sixteenth-century drawings connected to portraits had there been a serious effort to explore the obvious dis- parities in authorship, conception, handling of the medium, date, and probable function of these four drawings. Instead, they are improbably lumped together as Mantegna's, to the detriment of the integrity of this section of the exhibition.

Comparison with the 1961 exhibition also demonstrates that a major change in museums' lending policies concerning paintings on panel, or those on other supports whose condition is judged fragile, has occurred in the intervening years. A generation ago, Mantegna's Polyptych ofSt. Luke, painted in 1453-55 for Santa Giustina in Padua (Brera, Milan); the Enthroned Virgin and Saints from San Zeno, Verona; along with the Crucifixion (Louvre, Paris), one of the San Zeno altarpiece's alienated predella panels, were all exhibited, as was the so- called Uffizi triptych: three panels first united in a single frame in 1827- Adoration of the Magi, Circumcision, and

Ascension-believed to have come from a private chapel for Ludovico Gonzaga, which Mantegna finished around 1460. All of these paintings are on panel. None of these paintings was in the exhibition. The earlier show also was enhanced by its venue in Mantua. There, simply by walking from the main exhibition areas to another part of the Palazzo Ducale, visitors could find themselves surrounded by Mantegna's most celebrated fresco decoration, the small but

overwhelming Camera Picta of 1465-74 (then known as the Camera degli Sposi).

There Ludovico and his family and courtiers are portrayed in the monumentalized scenes of court life that were to become famous as supreme pictorial achievements of the Ital- ian Quattrocento.

Nowadays, because estimates of a picture's fragility weigh heavily in curators' decisions about loans, exhibitions that fea- ture panel paintings have become rare. Yet, without the paintings on wooden supports that were loaned to the present Mantegna show, its presentation of Mantegna's stature as a painter would have fallen far short of that provided by the well-rounded selection of drawings and the generally high-quality impressions of the engravings associated with him. Key works on wooden supports included the Prado's Death of the Virgin (fig. 1; cat. 17), announced in the London edition of the catalogue as going to London only, but in fact lent to New York as well. The St. George (cat. 42), and the Man of Sorrows with Two Angels (cat. 60), one of the exhibition's most sensational and least- familiar works (and in an exceptionally good state of preservation), are both painted in tempera on panel, as are the Portrait of a Man from the Uffizi (which is so reminiscent of the Camera Picta portraits, as noted in Keith Christiansen's catalogue entry), and the Berlin portrait of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan.

Yet the fragility of wood as a pictorial support is hardly the only determining fac- tor in judging a painting's suitability to be lent. As already indicated, a major contri- bution to art-historical knowledge results from the present exhibition's focus on Man- tegna's use of the medium of distemper (guazzo, or gouache). This is the subject of

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FIG. 1 Andrea Mantegna, Death of the Virgin, ca. 1460, tempera and gold on wood, 21Y4 x 16?Y2 inches. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

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Andrea Rothe's catalogue essay, which in- cludes a list of forty-one paintings in which the artist is known to have employed this medium, eighteen of them in the exhibition

(twenty-six, if the eight canvases of the

Triumphs, whose original medium has been obscured by incompetent restorations, are counted). The topic is also addressed by Christiansen in his essay on Mantegna's technique. The cumulative effect of this emphasis is a sharply increased awareness of the fragile state of many of Mantegna's distemper paintings.

Distemper, in which animal glue or casein is used instead of egg as a binder for the ground pigments, is applied on a fine plain-weave linen or canvas, with little or no gesso preparation. When the detailed catalogue information is combined with the opportunity this exhibition affords to study so many distemper paintings, a new under- standing of this medium's importance for Mantegna becomes possible. In addition, it is now clear that the general ignorance of how Mantegna used distemper, especially that he never applied varnish to pictures done in this medium, has led to severe damage to pigments when restorers var- nished paintings of this type. Their mat surfaces, which make the distemper resemble fresco rather than oil painting, have often been destroyed. Now we understand that the painter employed distemper increasingly because its inherent luminosity and chromatic clarity encouraged both the sculptural effects and the miniaturistlike precision of touch that are among his most characteristic hallmarks. These qualities are antithetical to the fusion of shape and shadow that other painters, such as Leonardo da Vinci, encouraged by the in- trinsic properties of the new medium of oil, began during Mantegna's lifetime to experi- ment with. That was the direction that painting would take in the future.

Thus equipped to imagine its vicissi- tudes, the viewer can understand what makes the Virgin and Child from the Ge- m~ildegalerie, Berlin (cat. 41), so dark. The intended chromatic effects of the original yellow, white, flesh color, and brown tones, with which Mantegna had anticipated a color scheme that was to become typical of later Venetian painting in the very medium, oil, that he avoided, must be re-created in the viewer's imagination. Fortunately, much of the richness and delicacy of color in Man-

tegna's spectacular late half-length Adora- tion of the Magi (cat. 56) survived beneath its layer of varnish. This discovery was made by the restorers at the J. Paul Getty Museum when the picture was cleaned after its purchase in 1985. Comparison of the

good color reproduction of it in the catalogue

(p. 238) with the painting's appearance at the time of the Splendours of the Gonzaga exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Mu- seum (1981) confirms this happy result.3 Interestingly, Rothe, who is head of Paint- ings Conservation at the Getty, decided not to apply varnish or synthetic resin to this painting's surface after cleaning. By con- trast, his catalogue of distemper paintings reveals that synthetic varnishes have been applied after restoration to some of them, obviously in the belief that the substance employed would not further harm the picture surface. The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele in Rome (cat. 135) is just such an example. Its glossy surface would probably have disturbed Mantegna.

Among the works in the exhibition, the late Ecce Homo of ca. 1500 (cat. 61) is perhaps the most informative about how Mantegna wanted his distemper paintings to look. Amazingly, it has never been var- nished. Mantegna's unusual close-up por- trayal of Christ in the unwelcome grasp of two hideous tormentors, whose demands that he be crucified are written in elegant classical letters on trompe l'oeil creased pieces of paper above their heads, may shock by its deeply ironic disjunctions, but it ultimately elicits an attentive scrutiny that reveals the myriad of minute strokes of shell gold lighting up Christ's hair and beard. Similarly, hundreds of flecks of gold render His halo both luminous and transparent, so that two otherwise almost invisible fourth and fifth figures emerge behind it as if on a slowly developing photographic film. The brilliant, saturated yellow of the right-hand tormentor's obsessively creased turban dis- rupts the viewer's meditative gaze with sur- prising vehemence, directing attention to how Mantegna employed what for others might be aesthetic types of beauty or ugli- ness, like this menacing and repulsive head, as analogues of the moral opposition between good and evil.

Perhaps the Ecce Homo's very super- abundance of miniaturistic precision is meant as a rebuke to Leonardo's more secu- lar and intellectual approach, which im-

plied that Mantegna's diligentia (as his technical precision was termed) was too bound up with an older, art-as-

craftsmanship tradition. Leonardo, Man-

tegna may well have felt, failed to comprehend the moral, and even the religious, im-

plications of such careful attention to detail in a devotional image. Leonardo visited Mantua during the winter of 1499-1500, after his patron, Ludovico Sforza, had been

expelled from Milan by the French. The desire of Isabella d'Este, wife of Francesco

Gonzaga, to have her portrait painted by Leonardo, the famous master who had been

the court artist of her beloved, recently de- ceased sister Beatrice (Sforza's wife), is re- corded in two preparatory studies (Louvre, Paris, and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). It might well have been felt by the aging Man- tegna as a stinging rejection, especially since earlier portraits by him had been criticized by both Ludovico Gonzaga and Isabella as being too dry. In addition to its power as a religious image, the Ecce Homo can be regarded as Mantegna's affirmation of a deeply held commitment about art, if not also as an expression of his self- identification with the suffering Christ, which may have inspired Albrecht Diurer to portray himself as the triumphant Redeemer in a famous self-portrait (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).

The full impact of Mantegna's illusionism, however, cannot be felt in an exhibition. It depends on the experience of a total spatial environment, such as the Ovetari Chapel in the Eremitani Church, Padua, where Mantegna executed, between 1449 and around 1457, an Assumption, scenes from the lives of St. James and St. Christo- pher, and visually persuasive fictive architectural surrounds in fresco-or the Cam- era Picta in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. In these programs Mantegna completely transforms the viewer's spatial envelope by illusionistic pictorial means. Illusionism- realized in various ways, from the meta- morphosis of a small interior room located deep within a fortress-type castle into an elegant open-air pavilion with an oculus in the middle of its ceiling through which can be seen the cloud-filled "sky," to the daring foreshortenings in the Ovetari St. James Led to His Execution and Martyrdom of St. Christopher, which guaranteed Mantegna's reputation as one of the greatest masters of perspective throughout the following centuries-was central to Mantegna's art.

Illusionism was the foundation of Man- tegna's legacy to future artists. Conse- quently, it was fascinating to note, in the gallery devoted to his early career, that his St. Mark (cat. 5), a very early work of around 1448, already boldly addresses this issue. Its various materials and textures-pearls, gold thread, gold bosses on the book, fine linen, hair, marble, fruit, and leaves-are rendered with seductive naturalism. Man-

tegna's success at this self-imposed task, at about age seventeen (or twenty, if a new

theory about his birth date, which is only briefly mentioned in the exhibition's cata-

logue, proves correct),4 may be interpreted as a boast of his virtuosity. The chiaro- scural drama of the saint's emergence from the background gloom into the light that strikes the arched window framing him, from an imagined source above and to the

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left, depends on a rigorous empirical anal-

ysis of the visual effects of light, good evi- dence for the precocious development of the artist's powers of close observation of na- ture. Even more remarkable are the painting's trompe l'oeil effects, usually associated with Flemish oil paintings on panel, but obtained by Mantegna using distemper on canvas. At the very time when Flemish

paintings done with the new oil glaze tech-

niques were beginning to be prized by col- lectors in Venice and Padua, he was proving that "Northern naturalism" could be matched using a native technique that had been evolved mainly for processional ban- ners and temporary festival architecture. As time went on, he discovered distemper's potential for achieving the crystalline sculptural effects he increasingly insisted

upon. Another kind of naturalism, distinct

from the optical rhetoric of the imitation of material substances, became increasingly important to Mantegna. This was what Ronald Lightbown has termed his "aesthetic of dramatic verisimilitude."5 Unlike the trompe l'oeil effects that made painters who could achieve them seem like magi- cians even to the most sophisticated viewers,6 this second type of naturalism did not rely on the effective replication of material substances, for which the ancient Greek painters were unfailingly praised in the classical texts that influenced Italian humanists' judgments about art. Instead, it appealed to viewers who could identify with Mantegna's sharp observation of the world around them, human behavior included.

This type of naturalism is perfectly embodied by the Prado's Death of the Vir- gin, a sublime masterpiece, recently re- stored. Creating an aura of intimate grief as the funerary rites are performed around the dead body of the Virgin, Mantegna here departs from customary static representa- tions of the scene with a rare ability to draw on first-hand experience of death in order to inject an intense jolt of actuality into the narrative (the scene is described in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine, but is not found in the Bible). The apostles on the right are shown singing, with open mouths; on the left, the youthful St. John carries a palm. A subject normally represented icon- ically here becomes a true narrative focus- ing on the Virgin's obsequies, its details selected according to Mantegna's new criteria of dramatic verisimilitude. An apostle wearing a tomato-red mantle that calls attention to his importance censes the body with unsettling vigor, as if in horrified re- sponse to the pallor and sunken cheeks by which the artist inscribed death upon the Virgin's face.

Most remarkable in this funereal context is the otherworldly beauty of the watery landscape visible through the square window behind the bier, a metaphor for that heavenly triumphant peace to which the

Virgin's soul aspires. In this landscape, a long covered bridge, the one that connected the main Gonzaga castle with the newer Castello di Corte, spans the lake formed by the Mincio River. The white walls and buildings clustered around the new castle seem a vision of an island, glistening in the sun. Despite damage to this area of the picture, we can still admire the landscape's unusual beauty and recognize Mantegna's innovative coup in giving prominence to an immediately identifiable (at least to his patron) view of the watery Mantuan environment, in a religious work that was probably intended for the Marchese's chapel within the very castle whose outlook is represented. The landscape's breadth, luminosity, and atmosphere were influenced by Mantegna's early contacts with his father- in-law, Jacopo Bellini; and the way Man- tegna creates a link between the biblical past and the physical present by means of an idyllic landscape recalls the practice of his brother-in-law, Giovanni Bellini. Partic- ular to Mantegna, however, is the way he visualizes the apostles' performance of funerary rituals, his means of departing from the traditional iconographic type.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's own Adoration of the Shepherds of ca. 1450-51 (cat. 8)-presently on canvas, though painted originally on panel-gains re- newed interest because of discoveries made about it recently by Christiansen.7 Al- though painted a decade earlier, it resem- bles the Prado painting in its combination of precocious naturalism in representing na- ture with a sharpened dramatic verisimilitude, unusual for such an early date. The realization that the wattle fence with a prom- inent squash to the left of the sleeping St. Joseph alludes to a personal emblematic device of Borso d'Este, the first Duke of Ferrara (r. 1450-71), has provided an en- tirely new Ferrarese context for the picture and a corresponding clarification of the importance for Mantegna's early career (ca. 1448-60) of his visit to the Ferrarese court of Lionello d'Este, Borso's brother and pre- decessor. A discovery made by Suzanne Boorsch also relates to Mantegna's con- nections to Ferrara. She realized that the inscription "DIVO HERCVLI iNVICTO" on several engravings probably indicates that they were made for Ercole I d'Este, another brother of Lionello, who succeeded Borso as the second Duke of Ferrara in 1471 (see cat. 86).

Mantegna's fascination with materials,

especially richly colored and dramatically patterned exotic marbles, prompted his invention of a new category of painting, the fictive relief, which combines his love for sculptural effects with his predilection for illusionism. In this new pictorial type, monochrome "reliefs" are arrestingly con- trasted with backgrounds painted to simu- late variegated marble in glowing shades, mainly of brown, yellow, and red. The wall labels in London termed the fictive reliefs "grisailles," while pointing out that this new painting type was Mantegna's unique invention. This conveyed the erroneous impression that Mantegna had invented the illusionistic simulation of sculpture in paint, a patent absurdity, especially con- sidering that his hometown, Padua, boasts the celebrated early fourteenth-century examples of grisaille painting by Giotto, his Virtues and Vices in the Arena Chapel. A

subcategory of Mantegna's fictive reliefs, bronzifinti, imitates bronze reliefs placed against bizarrely patterned "stone" backgrounds. Breathtaking examples of this type are the Judith with the Head of Holo- fernes and Dido (cats. 133 and 134) and A Sibyl and a Prophet(?) (cat. 128), announced in the London edition of the catalogue as shown in London only, but fortunately present in both venues. Mantegna's bronzifinti inspired Michelangelo's circular fictive bronze reliefs that are held up by pairs of Ignudi on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, though just how the younger artist knew about Mantegna's invention has not been determined. Perhaps he saw an example during one of the trips he made to northern Italy, in 1494-95 or in late 1506-7, before he began work in the Sistine Chapel.

The new type of picture is assumed to have been a literal substitute for small sculptural reliefs, though its invention might well have come from Mantegna's belief in the superiority of sculptural values, especially evident in the relieflike structure he devised for the half-length devotional paintings of the Holy Family or the Virgin and Child with saints of the 1490s, rather than from his patrons' needs or wishes. In their refined classicism, Mantegna's bronzi

finti resemble the bronze statuettes of Pier Jacopo Bonacolsi, called Antico (1460- 1528), who worked not for the Marchese Francesco and his wife, Isabella, but for Francesco's uncle, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga. Two examples of Antico's statuettes were added to the New York installation, providing an intelligent aid to the viewer's ability to infer the potential compe- tition implied by the paintings. Unlike most of Antico's statuettes, however, Mantegna's bronzifinti were not intended to allude to or to replicate the famous antiques, many of

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FIG. 2 Andrea Mantegna, Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue, ca. 1499-1502, tempera on canvas, 63 x 75% inches. Mus6e du Louvre, Paris.

them recently discovered in Rome, that soon formed the core of the papal antiquities collection.

The late phase of Mantegna's unique version of classical revival was splendidly represented by one of two major works

painted for the Studiolo of Isabella d'Este, Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden

of Virtue (fig. 2; cat. 136). Pallas Athena, an awe-inspiring figure dressed in an im-

posing gilt bronze breastplate and helmet, her yellow and rose chitons flying, the green changeant lining of the latter set off by a

silvery gray, crisply fluttering undergar- ment, rushes into the picture from the left, armed with a broken lance (standing for

victory) and shield. In Isabella's picture, Pallas becomes a symbol of chastity, in addition to her more conventional allusions to the moral and intellectual aspects of life and art. The goddess as portrayed by Man-

tegna with a faintly humorous touch could well be a self-chosen personification of Isabella, since these were the qualities with which this remarkable patron wished to

identify herself, using art patronage as one mode among several. The repulsive collection of Vices who slink off to the right into the brackish pond, fearing Athena's approach and that of her two scourging hand- maidens, constitutes an array of disquieting hybrids whose personifying symbols have

puzzled and fascinated generations of art historians. Christiansen, in his catalogue entry, draws attention to the description of this masterpiece, in an inventory compiled soon after Isabella's death, as a "virtue who

puts to rout the vices, among whom is idle- ness led by sloth and ignorance carried by ingratitude and avarice" (p. 429), in support of the idea that expert scholarly erudi- tion is not needed to comprehend this

straightforward picture. Nevertheless, Isa- bella's personalization of Athena here, and the consequent operation of the painting as an elaborate panegyric, may not yet have been fully explicated. After being swept up in the drama of the expulsion, with its echoes of the Adam and Eve story-to say nothing of the role in which this casts

Isabella-the viewer's eye is finally drawn to the landscape seen through the arches of

living shrubbery dotted with golden fruits. Its breadth and sweep, with glowing, luminous effects reminiscent of Giovanni Bel- lini's landscapes, demonstrates, if further

proof were needed, that ultimately the depth of Mantegna's comprehension of the classical world transcended archaeological erudi- tion and anticipated the "Et in Arcadia ego" of Poussin and Watteau.

Although Mantegna's paintings provided the most enthralling dimension of this exhibition, its consequences for future

scholarship may well hinge to a greater de-

gree on the questions it raises about the status of prints in Mantegna's oeuvre. There are two reasons for this. The first is the

disappearance from the ranks of Man-

tegna's printmakers of the name of Zoan Andrea, to whom the best of the prints not attributed to Mantegna himself have often been assigned. Both David Landau, who wrote the catalogue entries on the seven

engravings traditionally attributed to Man-

FALL 1992



tegna's own hand in the wake of Paul Kristeller's analysis," and Suzanne Boorsch of the Metropolitan Museum's print depart- ment, who was responsible for entries on thirty-eight prints usually given to Man- tegna's school, agreed that the "Zoan An- drea" who signed himself with the monogram "ZA" was none other than Giovanni Antonio da Brescia (active ca. 1490-after 1525), a printmaker who made copies of many prints by, or close to, Mantegna. Boorsch, in her entry on the Judith with the Head of Holofernes (cat. 144), which bears the monogram "ZA" and which A. M. Hind catalogued as Zoan Andrea 5,9 notes that just as traces of an earlier image, incom- pletely burnished out, are visible in this image, in turn traces of the Judith can be detected in a later engraving, which was signed "IO. AN. BRIXIA.," Giovanni Antonio's recognized monogram, thus proving that "ZA" stands for Zovanni Antonio, not Zoan Andrea.

Both authors agree that all the prints in the exhibition are based on designs made by Mantegna, but what is bound to generate controversy is Boorsch's conclusion that Mantegna in all likelihood did not perform the labor of engraving the plates with his own hand. In her view (see pp. 63-66), the plates for the seven "Mantegna" prints whose superb quality is universally recognized as the most accomplished (from both a technical and an expressive point of view) that the Quattrocento had to offer in this medium (Entombment [cat. 38], Risen Christ between St. Andrew and Longinus [cat. 45], Bacchanal with a Wine Vat [cat. 74], Bacchanal with Silenus [cat. 75], Bat- tle of the Sea Gods [cat. 79; actually two engravings joined to form one image], and Virgin and Child [cat. 48]) were actually cut by an anonymous engraver who is desig- nated "Premier Engraver." Boorsch attrib- utes sixteen additional engravings to the Premier Engraver, including the four re- ferred to in the catalogue as "attributed to Mantegna": Entombment with Four Birds (cat. 29), the Deposition (cats. 32 and 33), the Descent into Limbo (cat. 67), and the famous Flagellation with a Pavement (cat. 36).

Boorsch believes, moreover, that the Premier Engraver was active mainly in the 1490s (see cat. 84), which would date Man- tegna's prints later than is often believed to be the case. In the New York installation, the decision to hang cats. 29, 32, 33, and

36 close together with cats. 21 and 22 pre- ceding them (two states of Virgin and Child in the Grotto by the Premier Engraver) and with the exquisite Silenus with a Group of Children (cat. 84), a unique impression from the British Museum, close by, encouraged viewers to observe their cohesiveness as a group and the plausible continuity of hand between these prints and, for example, the Bacchanal with a Wine Vat.

In the essays by Landau and Boorsch, readers are offered alternative answers to this important question about the extent of

Mantegna's involvement in the production of his prints. Their contrasting solutions offer conclusions with divergent implications concerning Mantegna's view of himself, of artistic excellence, and of the artisanal component of artistic creativity. Landau's reconstruction of Mantegna's activity as a printmaker in his essay and catalogue entries (which adds four to the number of prints usually assigned to Mantegna's hand, thereby increasing, if accepted, the months that Mantegna would have had to devote to this labor-intensive activity), offers a Man- tegna for whom such a major investment of time and energy in a messy, artisanal pro- cess would not conflict with his belief that an artist's true worth resided in the mental processes of invention. In her essay "Man- tegna and His Printmakers," Boorsch suggests her reasons for doubting the conventional picture of the artist's hands-on invention of Italian printmaking. For her, Mantegna's artistic career as a whole, including his ambitions for higher social status and increased material well-being, mil- itates against the conclusion that he could have invested so much time in hands-on printmaking. Instead, she thinks, Man- tegna wanted to take advantage of the new medium's possibilities, both artistic and practical, by employing someone capable of the highest possible degree of skill and mastery to translate his designs, carefully worked out as they were in every respect, into the engraved masterpieces that the exhibition brought together.

A lasting legacy of the exhibition is thus likely to be its implicit critique of received ideas about Mantegna's "autograph" engravings. Must these works have been completely handmade by the artist in order to be considered genuine or authentic? The thrust of Mantegna's own presump- tions concerning the intellectual component of an artist's practice suggests that he would

have answered this question in the negative. He conceivably would have hoped that the power of the visual inventions themselves, made accessible to more than one owner by means of the new graphic medium's repro- ductive mechanism, would be recognized above all as deserving of high praise. The designs that underlie these prints reflect the scope and depth of Mantegna's comprehension of how line and tonality could be ex- ploited in new ways in order to take advantage of the expression through contour and finely gradated shifts of tonal value that the medium of engraving demanded. Thus the de-attribution of this core of superlative prints would not contradict what was also highly typical for Mantegna, which is born out by this opportunity to confront the great importance of his oeuvre in distemper as a new and experimental medium: the insep- arability in his practice of the goal of brilliant innovation in invention, and its achievement via a scrupulous mastery of technique that certified his fame in his own time.

Notes 1. The exhibition was first seen by this reviewer at its London venue, and the comments that follow are based for the most part on that. Although virtually identical to the American edition of the catalogue, the British edition, published by Electa, Milan, has 503 pages, 91 colorplates, and 230 black-and-white illustrations, of which 45 are photographs or diagrams of watermarks (also reproduced in the American edition). Other contributors to the catalogue, whose names do not appear on the title page, are David

Chambers, Lawrence Gowing, Andrea Rothe, and Rodolfo Signorini. 2. Giovanni Paccagnini, ed., Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat.

(Venice: Neri Pozza, 1961). 3. David Chambers and Jane Martineau, eds., Splendours of the Gonzaga, exh. cat. (London: Amilcare Pizzi for the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981), 123. 4. See Keith V. Shaw with Theresa M. Boccia-Shaw, "Man- tegna's Pre-1448 Years Reexamined: The S. Sofia Inscrip- tion," Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 47-57. 5. Ronald Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1986), 39. 6. See Bert Hansen, "The Complementarity of Science and Magic before the Scientific Revolution," American Scientist 74 (1986): 128-36. 7. Alessandra Mottola Molfino and Mauro Natale, eds., Le Muse e il Principe, exh. cat., 2 vols. (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini for the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, 1991), vol. 2, Catalogo, 307-12 (entry by Keith Christiansen). 8. Paul Kristeller, Andrea Mantegna (London, 1901); and idem, Andrea Mantegna (Berlin, 1902). 9. A. M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Cata-

logue with Complete Reproduction of All the Prints De-

scribed, 7 vols. (London, 1948), 5: 63.5.

WENDY STEDMAN SHEARD writes and lectures on Italian Renaissance art. Her article on Titiadn's

Paduanfrescoes is in Decorum in Renaissance Narrative Art (1992), edited by Francis Ames-Lewis and Anka Bednarek.

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Documents

Recent Native American Art || Andrea Mantegnaby Jane Martineau; Suzanne Boorsch; Keith Christiansen; David Ekserdjian; Charles Hope; David Landau