 |
| Girolamo da Cremona Pentecost ca. 1460-70 tempera on vellum (manuscript leaf) Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
"Italian artists of the fifteenth century applied mathematical principles in designing a painting. These Renaissance rules of composition – frequently adapted and rethought – would have an impact on European painting continuously down to our own day. In this miniature of Pentecost (the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles), nearly all the elements are arranged symmetrically around an invisible central axis. The solemn, columnar figure of the Virgin Mary along with the Holy Spirit in the form of a radiant descending dove indicate this axis. Equidistant from the axis appear the windows, the portals in the flanking walls, the pair of candlesticks on the mantel, and the apostles themselves. The two groups of apostles are organized in a mirror image of one another, a back row of three, a middle row of two, and in the foreground one each. The kneeling figures open around the Virgin like a pair of wings welcoming us. We look over the shoulders of the foremost apostles to participate."
"The artist avoids the monotony of strict symmetry by varying details, such as the colors of the apostles' robes, the men's gestures, and the arrangement of books around the candles, and by showing an open window (with a view) opposite a closed one. The geometric clarity of this design, the Virgin's imposing height, and the tall proportions of the room give this scene a monumental quality, even though the miniature itself measures only eight inches from top to bottom."
"The illuminator is Girolamo da Cremona (fl. 1458-1483), a protégé of the great painter Andrea Mantegna (circa 1431-1506). Girolamo moved among the powerful courts of Northern Italy. He illuminated books in Ferrara, Mantua, Siena, and Venice. Besides the thoughtful composition, another pleasure of Girolamo's art is his ability to describe the different textures of materials, from the stone window frames and the window's bull's-eye glass to the dull red bricks of the walls and the dyed leather bookbindings. The Pentecost was made for a liturgical book or a book of private devotion. No other part of the manuscript has come to light."
– text by curator Thomas Kren from Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Illuminated Manuscripts (Getty, 1997)
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Uffizi Triptych The Ascension of Christ, The Adoration of the Magi, The Circumcision ca. 1460-64 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Uffizi Triptych The Ascension of Christ ca. 1460-64 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Uffizi Triptych The Adoration of the Magi ca. 1460-64 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Uffizi Triptych The Circumcision ca. 1460-64 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
The extract below and those following are from The Art of Mantua: Power and Patronage in the Renaissance by Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini, translated by A. Lawrence Jenkens (Getty, 2008)
"As soon as he arrived in the city, Mantegna took preeminence in the artistic life of Mantua. . . . [His] first important commission from Ludovico Gonzaga was the decoration of the chapel in the Castello di San Giorgio, executed in the first half of the 1460s. It is unfortunately impossible to reconstruct the whole of Mantegna's original intentions there with any confidence, although some of the panels almost certainly traceable to the chapel still survive. They include three paintings in the Uffizi (The Ascension of Christ, The Circumcision, and The Adoration of the Magi); a Death of the Virgin at the Prado in Madrid; and a fragment of Christ Welcoming the Virgin in Heaven, which is now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara. Robert Longhi correctly identified the latter in 1934 as having been cut down from the upper part of the Madrid panel."
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Christ Welcoming the Virgin in Heaven ca. 1462 tempera on panel Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna The Death of the Virgin ca. 1462 tempera on panel Museo del Prado, Madrid |
"These paintings and an unknown number of others from the same work, were likely inserted in a wooden framework on the wall of the small chapel intended for the private use of the marquis. The miniaturist's precision in the details assumes that the curious and admiring viewer could linger over the pictures, noticing the shadings in the marble, the distant landscapes, and the rocks with small, delicate plants sprouting from their crevices, as well as the colorful range of figures with tall hats and eastern turbans who are watching their kneeling king offer his precious gift to the Christ Child. Reality and the sacred story collide in the Madrid panel: just beyond the doleful scene of the apostles mourning the death of the Virgin, a broad window opens to offer a view of the lowest of the Mincio's three lakes, the covered Ponte San Giorgio that spans it, and boats floating in the distance."
 |
| Giovanni Cristoforo Romano State Medallion of Isabella d'Este ca. 1505 gold and enamel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Parnassus 1496-97 tempera and oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue 1502 tempera and oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
"Isabella d'Este came to Mantua from Ferrara in 1490, at the age of seventeen, as the wife of Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, a war captain who loved art but was even fonder of arms, dogs, and horses. . . . Her quarters [in Castello di San Giorgio] consisted of two camere, or chambers, and a series of smaller rooms including an oratory, a library, and the studiolo, or little studio, that would become one of her greatest sources of pride. . . . After a long visit to her father's court in 1495, Isabella began a radical renovation of her studiolo with the Belfiore example in mind. She decided that her walls should be decorated with paintings that were both edifying and beautiful, and she commissioned them from artists whom she judged to be the best of her day, including, first and foremost, Andrea Mantegna. . . . The first painting to be executed, between 1496 and 1497, was Mantegna's so-called Parnassus. Venus and Mars stand at the center of the composition and atop an arch-shaped, natural rock formation and in front of a screen of lemon trees; they dominate the scene from on high, while in the foreground the nine Muses dance to a tune Apollo plays on his lyre. Mercury stands to the right of this group with Pegasus, his winged horse. In the background on the left, Vulcan, Venus's cuckolded husband, is intent on forging the delicate net he will use to avenge his injured honor. The surviving documents do not say whether some humanist adviser gave the artist a text for this complicated scene, but it is certain that contemporaries interpreted Venus as Isabella d'Este, ruler of a harmonious world governed by love and music."
"Mantegna's second painting for Isabella, Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of the Virtue, was executed in 1502. Here the artist distances himself even further from the softer atmospherics of contemporary painting, a trend that Isabella herself especially favored. The figures of the Vices wade waist-deep through a swamp, each one with an identifying label: Avarice, Ignorance, Ingratitude, Sloth, and Treachery. They begin to disperse when Minerva, Diana, and another figure commonly identified as Chastity arrive, but in truth they seem to be in no great hurry with their stolid visages and their filthy, deformed bodies. They are accompanied by small groups of satyrs and a lascivious, unforgettable Venus – more earthbound than celestial – who shows herself in all her splendor balanced impossibly on the back of a centaur. Above and behind the perfectly pruned hedge a fantastic orange mountain rises up; a gray cloud, anthropomorphic in shape, stands out against the sky; and in a misty mandorla the figures of Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance wait for Minerva to accomplish her task."
 |
| Lorenzo Costa Allegory of the Court of Isabella d'Este 1505 tempera and oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Andrea Mantegna and Lorenzo Costa The Realm of King Comus 1506-1511 tempera and oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
"The first of Lorenzo Costa's paintings arrived in Mantua in 1505 – his so-called Coronation of Isabella d'Este [also known as Allegory of the Court of Isabella d'Este]. The principle group in this picture – in which the marchioness may have been pleased to be included – consists of four musicians in the presence of an elegantly dressed artist-courtier who draws the scene and a chronicler who records it in words, all in a space defined by a slender hedge. Two maidens, seated in the foreground near a grey heron, wrap garlands around the heads of sheep and a cow. It is not clear whom they represent. Diana the Huntress and a warrior, probably Cadmus, the husband of Harmonia, are posed as the tutelary deities of the event. At the feet of the warrior lies the lifeless body of a dragon, its head severed. A battle rages in the background while in the distance the glassy water blends into the blue of the horizon."
"Mantegna was in the preliminary stages of another painting for this series at the time of his death, on September 13, 1506. Treating an unusual subject – The Realm of King Comus – the work was finally finished in 1511 by Lorenzo Costa, who rose to a privileged position at the Mantuan court between Mantegna's death and the arrival of Giulio Romano in 1524."
 |
| Correggio Allegory of the Virtues ca. 1530 tempera on canvas Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Correggio Allegory of the Vices ca. 1530 tempera on canvas Musée du Louvre |
"There are, unfortunately, no account books to allow us to reconstruct the appearance of Isabella d'Este's studiolo or grotto in the Castello di San Giorgio in any detail. We know much more, however, about the dowager apartments remodeled for her in about 1520, when the aging Isabella retired to the ground floor of the Corte Vecchia at the Gonzaga family palace. Its location spared her from negotiating stairs, and the move also liberated her rooms at the castle for her son Federico (1500-1540) who had succeeded his father as marquis in 1519. . . . The extra space in the new rooms allowed the marchioness to add two pictures to the original nucleus of paintings that hung in her first studiolo, both of them commissioned in about 1530 from one of the greatest artists of the time, Antonio Allegri, called Correggio (ca. 1489-1534). Isabella asked him to paint two allegories of virtue and vice, which were to hang on either side of the entryway. These pictures completed the cycle Mantegna had begun some thirty years before and underscored its most profound meaning – the triumph of virtue over vice. We do not know if Correggio was given detailed instructions on how to represent these subjects, but certainly the decision to use tempera, by then out of fashion, must have been imposed on the artist by his patron in order to diminish the stylistic difference between the earlier and later works. . . . Here again Isabella asserts the primacy of virtue, the principle message of her paintings. Indeed it seems that she hoped her carefully assembled collection would be seen as a reflection of her own virtue."