Mantegna, Andrea (1434–1506)

Italian painter whose new techniques in the composition of his pictures had a longlasting effect on later Renaissance painters. The son of a woodworker, he was adopted at a young age by Francesco Squarcione, a painter and collector who ran an art studio in the city of Padua. Mantegna struck out on his own at the age of seventeen, and soon afterward won important commissions, to paint an altarpiece for the Church of Santa Sophia and several large frescoes in the Church of the Eremitani. In these works Mantegna developed the new technique of perspective, which gives the illusion of three-dimensional subjects on a two-dimensional surface.

Mantegna was strongly influenced by the sculpture of Donatello, and the paintings of Paolo Uccello and Andrea del Castagno. He allied himself with the humanist movement that was flourishing in Padua, where university professors and scholars from all over Europe arrived to study the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors. He studied Roman ruins and literature, and consciously incorporated elements of the classical world into his works, one of the first Renaissance painters to do so.

In 1453 Mantegna married Nicolosia Bellini, the daughter of Jacopo Bellini and the sister of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini. Six years later he was invited by Ludovico Gonzaga, the marquess of Mantua, to become a court painter. He was commissioned to paint in the ducal palace of the city, where he completed two important works, the Wedding Chamber and the Painted Chamber. In these works Mantegna created an entirely new environment, covering all surfaces with striking, illusionistic pictures that place the viewer in another world, well outside the walls of the palace and the city. An oculus, or circular opening on the ceiling, gives way to a brightly painted sky, surrounded by a series

of foreshortened figures. These striking paintings established an entirely new technique of ceiling paintings done for private homes and churches that flourished in the late Renaissance and the Baroque eras. In the 1480s, while still in Mantua, Mantegna also completed The Triumph of Caesar, a series of nine paintings that showed a triumphal procession in ancient Rome. Soon after this work, Mantegna was commissioned to paint the private chapel of Pope Innocent VIII at the Belvedere Palace in Rome.

Mantegna's late paintings celebrate the accomplishments of the Gonzaga dynasty. He painted Lady of Victory to commemorate the success of Francesco Gonzaga at the Battle of Fornovo, and Parnassus, to mark the wedding of Francesco to Isabella d'Este. After his death Mantegna was honored by Mantua with an imposing funerary monument, a rare honor for an artist even at the height of the Italian Renaissance.

See Also: Bellini, Giovanni; d'Este, Isabella; Gonzaga, House of; Mantua