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Revising Mantegna
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20242 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
2,213 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
In 1475, one Simone di Ardizone of Reggio, a painter and engraver, sent a letter of complaint to Ludovico Gonzaga, Marchese of Mantua, in which he demanded the arrest of Andrea Mantegna. Simone had just been in Mantua where Mantegna, the leading painter at the Gonzaga court, made him all kinds of "offers," presumably for Simone to make engravings after some drawings. But Simone's Mantuan friend, the artist Zoan Andrea, had recently been robbed of his own engraved plates, so Simone agreed to help him re-create them. Mantegna had some past differences with Andrea and may in fact have been behind the theft. In any event, according to Simone.
When that devil Andrea Mantegna learned I was remaking the said plates, he sent to threaten me a Florentine, swearing he would pay me for it. . . it soon followed that Zoan Andrea and I were assaulted one evening by. . . more than ten armed men who tried to kill us, and I can give proof of this. And to prevent the said work from continuing, Andrea Mantegna has found certain knaves who to serve him have accused me of sodomy. . .
From safe refuge in Verona, Simone condemned Mantegna as tyrant, ruling "with his pride and dominion over Mantua," and warned, "If your Lordship does not restrain him, great scandals will ensue on his account. The politic marchese kept things quiet, and the painter seems to have escaped punishment--which is not to say that he was innocent. Ronald Lightbown, in his recent monograph on the artist, states, "Towards the end of his life [Mantegna] had come to see himself as a man of genius continually assailed and thwarted by the detraction, envy and incomprehension of foolish and stupid little men."
Such was the difficult character of Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506), one of the luminaries of the Italian Renaissance, whose work is now featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in America's first full-blown exhibition of his work. Organized jointly with London's Royal Academy of Arts, the show presents more than 130 paintings, drawings, and prints either by Mantegna himself or derived from his designs. The original plan was to make a print and drawing exhibition, but the organizers decided to include the grisaille (simulated relief) paintings that complement the prints, and finally to mount a full retrospective. The last great Mantegna show took place in Mantua in 1961, before modern conservation proscribed shipping fragile works. Today, as is always the case, key works were not included. But the current exhibition, though short on paintings, still provides a broad survey of Mantegna's themes and aesthetic predilections. Moreover, the research set forth in the
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