Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/525

Rh M A N M A N 501 fifty campaigns, all glorious, and destroyed many cities, including the three capitals of Leon, Pampeluna, and Bar celona, and the sacred shrine of Santiago de Compostella. In Africa his armies were for a time hard pressed by the revolt of Ziri, viceroy of Mauretania, but before his death this enemy had also fallen. Al-Mansur died at Medinaceli 10th August 1002, and was succeeded by his son Modaffar. 1 4. Abii Yusuf Ya kiib ibn Yusuf (Jacob Almanzor), of t le Moorish dynasty of the Almohades, the conqueror of Alphonso III. in the great battle of Alarcos (1195), reigned 1184-99. MANTEGNA, ANDREA (U31-1506), one of the chief heroes in the advance of painting in Italy, was born in or near Padua, of very humble parentage. It is said that in his earliest boyhood Andrea was, like Giotto, put to shepherding or cattle-herding ; but this can have lasted only a very short while, as his natural genius for art developed with singular precocity, and excited the attention of Francesco Squarcione, who entered him in the guild of painters before he had completed his eleventh year. Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a proportionate faculty for acting, with profit to himself and others, as a sort of artistic middleman ; his own per formances as a painter were merely mediocre. He travelled in Italy, and perhaps in Greece also, collecting antique statues, reliefs, vases, &amp;lt;tc., forming the largest collection then extant of such works, making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others to study from, and then undertaking works on commission for which his pupils no less than himself were made available. As many as one hundred and thirty-seven painters and pictorial students passed through his school, established towards 1440, which became famous all over Italy. Mantegna was, as he deserved to be, Squarcione s favourite pupil. Squarcione adopted him as his son, and purposed making him the heir of his fortune. Andrea was only seven teen when he painted, in the church of St Sophia in Padua, a Madonna picture of exceptional and recognized excellence. He was no doubt fully aware of having achieved no com mon feat, as he marked the work with his name and the date, and the years of his age. This painting was destroyed in the 17th century. The affectionate relation between Squarcione and Mantegna was not destined to continue long. As the youth progressed in his studies, he came under the influence of Jacopo Bellini, a painter considerably superior to Squarcione, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni and Gentile, and of a daughter Niccolosia ; and at some date, which may have been towards 1450, Jacopo gave Niccolosia to Andrea in marriage. This connexion of Andrea with the pictorial rival of Squarcione is generally assigned as the reason why the latter became alienated from the son of his adoption, and always afterwards hostile to him. Another suggestion, which rests, however, merely on its own internal probability, is that Squarcione had at the outset used his pupil Andrea as the unavowerl executant of certain commissions, but that after a while Andrea began painting on his own account, thus injuring the professional interests of his chief, and incurring his animosity. The remarkably definite and original style formed by Mantegna may be traced out as founded on the study of tho antique in Squarcione s atelier, followed by a diligent application of principles of work exemplified by Paolo Uccello and Douatello, with the practical guidance and example of Jacopo Bellini in the sequel. Among the other early works of Mantegna are the fresco of two saints over the entrance-porch of the church of S. 1 His life is brilliantly described in vol. iii. of Dozy, Jlistoire des Mtisulmans d Espagne. Antonio in Padua, 1452, and an altarpiece of St Luke and other saints for the church of St Justina, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan, 1453. It is probable, however, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione, including Mantegna, had already begun that series of frescos in the chapel of St Christopher, in the church of S. Agostino degli Eremitani, by which the great painter s reputation was fully confirmed, and which remain to this day conspicuous among his finest achievements. 2 The now censorious Squarcione found much to carp at in the earlier works of this series, illustrating the life of St James ; he said the figures were like men of stone, and had better have been coloured stone-colour at once. Andrea, con scious as he was of his great faculty and mastery, and of the transcendent display he had here made of these, seems nevertheless to have felt that there was something in his old preceptor s strictures ; and the later subjects, from the legend of St Christopher, combine with his other excel lences more of natural character and vivacity. Trained as he had been in the study of marbles and the severity of the antique, and openly avowing that he considered the antique superior to nature as being more eclectic in form, he now and always affected precision of outline, dignity of idea and of figure, and he thus tended towards rigidity, and to an austere wholeness rather than gracious sensi tiveness of expression. Plis draperies are tight and closely folded, being studied (as it is said) from models draped in paper and woven fabrics gummed. Figures slim, mus cular, and bony, action impetuous but of arrested energy, tawny landscape, gritty with littering pebbles, mark tho athletic hauteur of his style. He never changed, though he developed and perfected, the manner which he had adopted in Padua ; his colouring, at first rather neutral and undecided, strengthened and matured. There is throughout his works more balancing of colour than fine ness of tone. One of his great aims was optical illusion, which he carried out by a mastery of perspective that, though not always impeccably correct, nor absolutely superior in principle to the highest contemporary point of attainment, was worked out by himself with strenuous labour, and an effect of actuality astonishing in those times. Successful and admired though he was in Padua, Mantegna left his native city at an early age, and never afterwards resettled there ; the hostility of Squarcicne has been assigned as the cause. The rest of his life was passed in Verona, Mantua, and Piome chiefly Mantua ; Venice and Florence have also been named, but without confirmation. It may have been in 1459 that he went to Verona; and he painted, though not on the spot, a grand altarpiece for the church of S. Zenon, a Madonna and angels, with four saints on each side. The Marquis Lodovico Gonzaga of Mantua had for some time been pressing Mantegna to enter his service ; and the following year, 14GO, was perhaps the one in which he actually established himself at the Mantuan court, residing at first from time to time at Goito, but, from December 146G onwards, with his family in Mantua itself. His engagement was for a salary of 75 lire (about 30) a month, a sum so large for that period as to mark conspicuously the high regard in which his art was held. He was in fact the first painter of any eminence 2 His fellow-workers were Bono of Ferrara, Ansuino of Forli, and Niccolo Pizzolo, to whom considerable sections of tlie fresco-paintings are to be assigned. The acts of St James and St, Christopher are the leading subjects of the series. St James Exorcising may have been commenced by Pizzolo, and completed by Mantegna. The Calling of St James to the Apostleship appears to be Mantegna s design, partially carried out by Pizzolo ; the subjects of St James baptizing, his appear ing before the judge, and going to execution, and most of the legend of St Christopher, are entirely by Mantegna.