Mantegna’s lifelong utilisation of strong, and at times jumpy, perspective springs from his training in Squarcione’s studio. Mantegna went on to surpass Squarcione in depicting spatial depth and three-dimensionality, and he came to learn more about antiquity than Squarcione ever knew. He paid particular attention to the abundant remains of Roman architecture in northern Italy, so when he later went to Rome for the first time as a middle-aged man he had already had significant contact with the ruins of classical civilisation. In short, everything conspired to make Mantegna passionate about the ancient past and classical art: his artistic training with Squarcione, an educated public yearning for visual revivals of the ancient world, and his opportunity in northern Italy to study ancient art and architecture first-hand. We will see that his paintings included convincing and well-researched recreations of ancient Roman costumes, architecture, and sculpture.
Many of Squarcione’s pupils, including Mantegna, Giorgio Schiavone, and Marco Zoppo came to have certain features in common in their art: clear colouring, sharp, lively contours, profuse details, a certain restless energy, and a liberal use of classical elements such as swags of vegetation and architectural components. Mantegna surely learned the essence of his art in Squarcione’s studium. Yet, Mantegna was highly independent and precocious, and his art swiftly progressed beyond the training Squarcione gave him. In addition to the master’s in-house instruction, Squarcione must also have pointed him in the right direction in a search for sources of inspiration. Squarcione was not the most progressive artist in the area, and Mantegna would certainly have profited from seeing the works of several Florentine masters whose works were in Padua or in nearby Venice.
It was in Florence in the early fifteenth century that many of the aspects of the Early Renaissance style first developed, including vivid realism, use of linear perspective, clear storytelling, and the convincing representation of emotional expression. This style challenged the sweet, elegant Gothic manner, which continued to flourish in northern Italy until Mantegna’s time.
12. Preparatory drawing for the St James Led to Execution, c. 1448–1457. Pen and ink and black chalk on paper, 15.5 × 23.4 cm. British Museum, London.
One of the characteristic exponents of the late Gothic style was Stefano da Zevio, whose Madonna and Child with God the Father in a Garden serves as an example of this graceful, decorative style: with its flowery background, elegant, ethereal figures, inexpressive faces, and delicate lighting running like quicksilver across the surfaces, it is characteristic of the traditional medieval fashion that was beginning to be replaced by the new tough and worldly manner which came to prevail in the early fifteenth century. In contrast to such a work, Mantegna would have been able to study Florentine Renaissance works in Venice, such as the saints by Andrea del Castagno in San Zaccaria, which convey a blunt, naturalistic, and monumental ideal of the human figure. Some bronze reliefs and freestanding figures by the Florentine sculptor Donatello were designed for the Paduan church of Sant’Antonio soon after 1443. These reliefs show the kind of deep space and dramatic narrative Mantegna would later echo in his own art. Donatello was mostly in Padua for the eleven years prior to 1453, and Mantegna is likely to have known him personally. Inspiration from Florentine art helped to propel art in northern Italy, including Mantegna’s, away from dreamy legacy of the late Middle Ages towards a brittle, dry, and more classicised style.
Blessed with a progressive training in the craft of painting and enviable talents, Mantegna was ready to start his professional career at an early age. In 1448, Mantegna painted an altarpiece in Padua for the high altar of the church of Santa Sophia. He was only seventeen years old, and even so this work was received with critical acclaim. Unfortunately this altarpiece is now lost. His next great commission came when he began, at the age of eighteen or so, to paint murals in a chapel in the Church of the Eremitani in Padua. The frescoes were commissioned by Antonio degli Ovetari, a member of a wealthy and established family of Padua.
After he died in 1448, his wife, Imperatrice, used the funds left in his will to have the project brought to completion. The chapel, a small section of the much larger church, was to be filled with frescoes depicting the lives of Saints James and Christopher. It is impossible to separate the religious from the secular motives of patrons of such grand projects, but clearly there was – in addition to the religious devotion of Antonio – a desire on his part to bring glory to himself and his whole family by causing such a great artwork to come into being. Indeed, murals in private chapels were essentially public monuments, symbols of the refinement and devotion of the local citizens; visitors to Padua from other parts of Italy and the rest of Europe would come to see the great frescoed walls of the Eremitani church. Today the family chapels of Italy form living museums, legacies of the religious spirit of the age as well as evidence of the personal pride of the patrons.
13. St James Led to Execution (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
14. Self-Portrait (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
Since Antonio degli Ovetari and his wife Imperatrice had friends and associates who were learned and scholarly citizens of Padua, it is not surprising they would wish to have paintings done in the new Renaissance style, with strong classical overtones. And indeed, although some older, more conservative artists from Venice were for a brief time intended to share in the project (they eventually painted only some lesser parts of the chapel), it was the new generation of Renaissance painters who were destined to paint the great narrative scenes. The patrons perhaps turned first to the locally famous Squarcione, who then passed along the work largely to his talented student Mantegna. Other painters were involved as well. Another pupil of Squarcione, Niccolò Pizzolo, was now a practicing painter and sculptor, and he got a large part of the commission. Pizzolo died in a sword fight at the age of thirty-three, before he could paint anything but a few figures around the perimeter and on the vault of the chapel; he also made the sculptured altar showing the Madonna and Saints, its wiry figures inspired by the style of Donatello.
Pizzolo was about ten years older than Mantegna, and he must have impressed upon the young artist the importance of studying the new Tuscan Renaissance manner, which he had so thoroughly imbibed. Indeed, the Ovetari Chapel is a microcosm of the pattern of change which brought about the change toward the new style in art. Older masters did not respond favourably to the Tuscan Renaissance style, but the younger generation, including Mantegna and Pizzolo, took the lead in ushering the novel manner in to their local setting. This shift occurred in city after city during the fifteenth century – including Ferrara, Milan, Venice, Urbino – as the central Italian style was adopted, interpreted, and varied by a wide range of artists. Compared to Mantegna and Pizzolo, even the work of Squarcione was rather conservative and unadventurous (cf. Fig. 6); it was the master’s training and open attitude to the study of various styles that was progressive. The Ovetari Chapel was a showpiece of artistic revolution, and Mantegna, thanks partly due to the early death of Pizzolo, was responsible for the greatest part of the work.
The Ovetari Chapel was almost completely destroyed during an aerial raid in 1944 when a cluster of bombs meant for the nearby railroad yards fell wide of the mark. Fortunately, colour illustrations of the works were taken shortly before the destruction. Some of the works were removed from the wall for restoration before the raid, notably Mantegna’s Assumption of the Virgin (Fig. 19) and his Martyrdom of Saint Christopher (Fig. 7); these survive and have been reinstalled in the chapel, giving us an idea of Mantegna’s great achievement.
Some of the more extraordinary works of art of the fifteenth century resulted from the application of Renaissance ideals of lively and detailed narrative to the illustration of fantastic medieval accounts of saints. Most of Mantegna’s scenes in the Ovetari Chapel