Mantegna and Bellini Lubbock, Jules
Art and Christianity,
01/2018
96
Journal Article
Lubbock examines two Renaissance masters at the National Gallery this winter. It is Jacopo Bellini's drawing book from the British Museum, and behind it on two adjacent walls, angled themselves like ...an open book, are two paintings of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The one on the left is by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Jacopo's son-in-law, that on the right by Jacopo's son, Giovanni Bellini (c.1433?-1516), Mantegna's brother- in-law. This coup de theatre announces the theme of the show: the lifetime relationship between the two brothers-in-law, never before featured in an exhibition, as well as Jacopo's influence upon both. It is also the first time since the mid-15th century that these two Presentations have been seen together. Their juxtaposition is fascinating.
According to modern historical literature, Marquis Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua (1484–1519) tolerated and protected his Jewish subjects. Francesco permitted Jewish moneylenders to carry arms to ...defend themselves from Christian attack, and absolved the Jews from wearing the compulsory ‘rsquo;Jewish badge’. This paper explores the politics of tolerance in Quattrocento Mantua through an analysis of two fifteenth‐century Mantuan altarpieces associated with Marquis Francesco and the prominent Jewish moneylender Daniele da Norsa: the 1496 Madonna della Vittoria by Andrea Mantegna and the anonymous Madonna and Child with Saints and Norsa Family (c. 1499). Central to my investigation are the ideological implications embedded in the image of the Christian as dominant and virtuous, and the Jew as dominated and pernicious. By examining the subtle ways in which both Mantuan altarpieces diverge from pictorial tradition, I demonstrate how these paintings rhetorically articulated identity and difference within a symbolic language of violence.
This article aims to describe the portrayal of Jesus’s circumcision in Venetian paintings of the Renaissance period.¹ The research is oriented toward the painters Giovanni Bellini and Andrea ...Mantegna, who were brothers-in-law, and Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), whose artworks, despite not showing the essential moment of the removal of the foreskin, show the Jewish ritual of circumcision; they painted Jesus’s presentation in the Temple in a similar manner. Regarding their knowledge of Jewish tradition, we do know that Andrea Mantegna painted portraits of Jews, and that Mantegna and Titian portrayed Jewish objects in their paintings. Moreover, Bellini and Titian depicted the
