Recent scholarship on the nineteenth-century serialized artists’ monograph has argued for a reassessment of this particular genre of art writing and its role in the development of art history as a ...discipline. Women art writers number prominently among the authors within such series, which proliferated in the English art press at the turn of the century. Significantly, many of their contributions form the first separate English-language study of several important quattrocento Italian old masters. Yet these artists, such as Luca Signorelli, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Andrea Mantegna, were for the most part considered unpopular and ‘difficult’ for the general public to appreciate. This may explain why, despite substantial foreign-language scholarship and Mantegna’s never-waning reputation as a ‘great’ artist, it was not until 1881 that he became the subject of a dedicated study in British art historical scholarship for the first time, with Julia Cartwright’s dual monograph Mantegna and Francia. Taking Mantegna as a case study, this article traces the various forms in which the artist became increasingly visible to the British public from the mid-century onwards via the practices of acquisition, display, reproduction, and travel, and how this visibility translated into Julia Cartwright’s monograph, in which she set out to reinvigorate the reputation of an artist well represented in British collections, but deemed distasteful to the Victorian eye. As earlier women writers such as Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Maria Callcott had successfully promoted the much-maligned Italian ‘Primitives’ to a wider British public, a later generation of women took advantage of gaps in English-language art criticism as they worked to establish themselves professionally in the face of an over-saturated British art press during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The unique pictorial language of Mantegna's Dido, Judith and his other fictive reliefs suggest that he utilized the arguments made by humanists in defence of poetry, in which Dido was a figure of ...particular importance, to assert that painting also possessed a unique potential to enhance viewers' understanding of the past and its importance to the study of moral philosophy. This reflects not only the culmination of Mantegna's decades spent contemplating the material culture of classical antiquity but also the interests of his last chief patron, Isabella d'Este, whose patronage demonstrates an enduring interest in the literature of moral exemplars and an awareness of the potential of female role models in particular to contribute to contemporary discourse on moral philosophy.
Mantegna the Grammarian Cassegrain, Guillaume
Art history,
April 2014, Letnik:
37, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The problem raised by this contemporary critical reception of Andrea Mantegna's work, systematically neglecting the structuralist tradition and the role played by language theories in art history in ...recent years, is a symptom of the theoretical oppositions often seen at work in the practice of art history. Mantegna's art offers the opportunity, through his uncommon formal characteristics and the history of his critical reception, to question the relevance of certain methodological propositions made in the 1960s and 1970s, and to come back to the link, so problematic nowadays, between art and language.
Among the most elaborate and coherent instances of Renaissance self-fashioning and female self-determination through culture was a suite of rooms designed by Isabella d’Este in what is now the Ducal ...Palace museum of Mantua, Italy: a full-blown personal studiolo (study) and an adjoining smaller chamber she called the grotta (grotto). Isabella’s studiolo is a regular point of reference in the study of Renaissance history and art, yet for centuries it has been accessible only in dispersed pieces and in spaces depopulated of major works and artefacts. Digital technology offers the possibility of creating a “remastered” studiolo, a virtual space in which both visual and acoustic elements may be enhanced with respect to previous attempts at its representation. At the same time, historical uncertainty about numerous details in the arrangement of the objects in this collection requires a high level of flexibility in the digital remix, allowing for the programming of a customisable virtual environment. In anticipation of the project’s full construction and in order to facilitate discussion with potential users about the Virtual Studiolo’s backward design, the authors have developed a concept-demonstration video within the open-source Blender environment (www.blender.org). Among the concerns we aim to address in this phase of the project is how to combine historical accuracy, emotional power, and creative possibilities for users. This case study presents some of the opportunities, constraints and challenges we confronted during the production of our video as we strove within the Blender open environment for a result that will be historically accurate, emotionally compelling, and creatively flexible.
This paper explores the intellectual and social circumstances that informed the production of Andrea Mantegna's Mars and Venus (1497), the first painting executed for the studiolo of Isabella d'Esté ...Gonzaga. Documentary evidence suggests that Mantegna collaborated on this project with an iconographic advisor, most likely the learned Paride da Ceresara. The author argues, somewhat against the received wisdom, that both Paride and Mantegna are responsible for this painting's invention, and maintains that the collaborative nature of their enterprise invites us to rethink the nature of artistic 'invention' itself. The term, which entered the lexicon of early modern art theory via the writings of Cicero and Quintilian, describes an intellectual process of discovery. Paride, as the paper attempts to show, discovered his iconographic invenzione by using the techniques of humanist philology. Mantegna drew on his knowledge of classical sculpture, as well as a hitherto unacknowledged tradition of textual criticism that linked his handling of a brush to the tenets of ancient rhetorical theory and to the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Discovering in these contexts a set of poetic, formal, and stylistic devices uniquely suited to the learned environment of Isabella's studiolo, Mantegna and Paride together invented a means of visibly addressing their patron's concerns, concerns that are ultimately tied to the Platonic philosophy of the soul.
Andrea Mantegna is without doubt one of the most studied and as a result one of the best known figures in Italian Renaissance art. The present collection of essays will attempt to address an ...important dimension to scholarship on the artist, and on Renaissance art more broadly, which has largely been sidelined in publications dating from and subsequent to the 2006 anniversary: for several decades, Mantegna's painting has been an important locus for experimental approaches to the interpretation of pre-modern art, that address what might be called the 'poetics' of Renaissance painting.
In 1974, a hidden face resurfaced within the Camera Picta (Plate 1). Although it had been neither obscured nor hidden by restoration, it had somehow remained unseen for nearly five centuries, lost ...amidst the rich ornament of one of the most complex mural decorations of the quattrocento (Plate 2). Ignored by art historians whose main focus had been the exegesis of the scenes on the walls and the enigmatic imagery of the vault, this small detail inserted in the right pilaster of The Meeting - an element of the decoration usually considered secondary - was not brought to the fore until Rodolfo Signorini found it of sufficient interest to reveal it. With shadows under the eyes, deep wrinkles around the mouth and a serious expression, this face was anything but inconsequential for the Mantuan historian: it was a portrait of Andrea Mantegna himself, displaying the same traits as the artist's known portraits - the self-portrait in the Berlin museum's Presentation in the Temple and the bronze bust in the artist's memorial chapel at San Andrea. It was thus important to assign it a place within the semantic economy of the painting, a goal which has now been partially accomplished: for Signorini, the portrait was Mantegna's way of appending his signature in figura.
The earliest image of an Australasian parrot by a European artist predates the arrival of Vasco de Gama's fleet at Calicut on the Malabar Coast in 1498. This article focuses on that image – a small ...but significant detail in Andrea Mantegna's Madonna della Vittoria, completed in Mantua in 1496. Although Mantegna's altarpiece has been the subject of attention in modern scholarship, the significance of the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo has not been explored. In this article, I consider why Mantegna would have included parrots in his altarpiece and the symbolic significance of the cockatoo's position in the composition. I also explore the intriguing issue of how a creature native to regions generally considered to have been beyond Europe's trading reach in 1496 could have appeared in a Renaissance artwork. The Sulphur-crested Cockatoo in the Madonna della Vittoria provides a unique opportunity to place fifteenth-century Italy in its global context. Its presence not only confirms the interests and purchasing power of Mantegna and his patrons, the Gonzagas, it reveals the complexity and range of South-East Asian trading networks prior to the establishment of European trading posts in the region.
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