Volume 39, Number 10 · May 28, 1992
Triumphs of Mantegna
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
Andrea Mantegna 17–April 6, 1992, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 9–July 12, 1992
an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, January
Andrea Mantegna
catalog of the exhibition, edited by Jane Martineau et al.
Olivetti/Electa, 499 pp., $39.50 (paper)
In 1786, on his famous Italian journey, Goethe came to Padua and visited the church of the Eremitani, the Hermit Friars. There he saw the frescoes by Mantegna, of the lives of Saint James and Saint Christopher, in the funerary chapel of Antonio degli Ovetari. He stood before them 'astounded' at their scrupulous detail, their imaginative power, their strength and subtlety, and as he recorded it, a cascade of epithets tumbled from his pen. Here he had found one of 'the older painters' who stood behind and inspired the great masters of the High Renaissance, enabling them to take off from earth toward heaven. 'Thus did art develop after the ages of barbarism': Mantegna pointed to Titian.
Review, 3173 words
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