Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/526

Rh 502 A N M A N ever domiciled in Mantua. He built a stately bouse in the city, and adorned it with a multitude of paintings. The house remains, but the pictures have perished. Some of his early Mantuan works are in that apartment of the Castello which is termed the Camera degli Sposi, full compositions in fresco, including various portraits of the Gmzaga family, and some figures of genii, &c. In 1488 he went to Rome at the request of Pope Innocent VIIL, to paint the frescos in the chapel of the Belvedere in the Vatican ; the duke of Mantua created him a cavaliere bafore his departurs. This series of frescos, including a inted Baptism of Christ, was ruthlessly destroyed by Pius VI. in laying out the Museo Pio-Clementino. The pope treated Mantegna with less liberality than he had been used to at the Mantuan court : but on the whole their connexion, which ceased in 1490, was not unsatisfactory to either party. Mantegna then returned to Mantua, and went on with a series of works the nine tempera-pictures, each of them 9 feet square, of the Triumph of Ctesar which he had probably begun before his leaving for Rome, and which are now in Hampton Court. These superbly invented and designed compositions, gorgeous with all splendour of subject-matter and accessory, and with the classical learning and enthusiasm of one of the master spirits of the age, have always been accounted of the first ruik among Mantegna s works. They were sold in 1628 along with the bulk of the Mantuan art treasures, and ware not, as is commonly said, plundered in the sack of Mantua in 1G30. They are now greatly damaged by patchy repaintings. Another work of Mantegna s later years was the so-called Madonna della Vittoria, now in the Louvre. It was painted in tempera about 1495, in com memoration of the battle of Fornovo, which Gonzaga found it convenient to represent to his lieges as an Italian victory, though in fact it had been a French victory ; the church which originally housed the picture was built from Mintegna s own design. The Madonna is here depicted with various saints, the archangel Michael and St Maurice holding her mantle, which is extended over the kneeling Francesco Gonzaga, amid a profusion of rich festooning and other accessory. Though not in all respects of his highest order of execution, this counts among the most obviously beautiful and attractive of Mantegna s works, from which it must be said that the qualities of beauty and attraction arc often excluded, in the stringent pursuit of those other excellences more germane to his severe genius, tonse energy passing into haggard passion. Vasari eulogizes Mantegna for his courteous, distin guished, and praiseworthy deportment, although there are indications of his having been not a little litigious in dis position. With his fellow-pupils at Padua he had been affection ite ; and for two of them, Dario da Trevigi and M irco Zoppo, he retained a steady friendship. That he hid a high opinion of himself was natural, for no artist of his epoch could produce more manifest vouchers of high and progressive attainment. He became very expensive in his habits, fell at times into difficulties, and had to urge his valid claims upon the duke s attention. After his return to Mantua from Rome his prosperity was at its height, until the death of his wife. He then formed some other connexion, and became at an advanced age the father (if a natural son, Giovanni Andrea; and at the last, although he continued launching out into various expenses and schemes, he had serious tribulations, such as the banishment from Mantua of his son Francesco, who had incurred the duke s displeasure. Perhaps the aged master and connoisseur regarded as barely less trying the hard necessity of parting with a beloved antique bust of Faustina. Very soon after this transaction he died in Mantua, on l?th September 150G In 1517 a handsome monument was set up to him by his sons in the church of S. Andrea, where he had painted the altarpiece of the mortuary chapel. We have spoken as yet of Mantegna as a painter and architect ; he was no less eminent as an engraver, and is reported to have been a sculptor and poet as well, though we are not aware that any verses of his are extant, or that his sculptural practice extended beyond making a drawing for a statue of Virgil. As an engraver his his tory is somewhat obscure, partly because he never signed or dated any of his plates, unless in one single disputed instance, 1472. The account which has come down to us is that Mantegna began en graving in Rome, prompted by the engravings produced by Barcio Baldini of Florence after Sandro Botticelli ; nor is there anything positive to invalidate this account, except the consideration that it would consign all the numerous and elaborate engravings made by Mantegna to the last sixteen or seventeen years of his life, which seems a scanty space for them. To get over this difficulty, it has been suggested, but without any evidence, that he began engraving while still in Padua, under the tuition of a distinguished .goldsmith, Niccolo. He engraved about fifty plates, according to the usual reckoning ; some thirty of them are indisputable often large, full of figures, and highly studied. Among the principal examples are Roman Triumphs (not the same compositions as the Hampton Court pictures), A Bacchanal Festival, Hercules and Antams, Marine Gods, Judith with the Head of Holophernes, the Deposition from the Cross, the Entombment, the Resurrection, the Man of Sorrows, the Virgin in a Grotto. Mantegna has sometimes been credited with the important invention of engraving with the burin on copper. This claim cannot be sustained on a comparison of dates, but at any rate he introduced the art into upper Italy. Several of his engravings are supposed to be executed on some metal less hard than copper. The technique of himself and his followers is charac terized by the strongly marked forms of the design, and by the oblique formal hatchings of the shadows. The prints are frequently to be found in two states, or editions. In the first state, the prints have been taken off with the roller, or even by hand-pressing, and they are weak in tint ; in the second state, the printing press has been used, and the ink is stronger. The influence of Mantegna on the style and tendency of his age was very marked, and extended not only to his own floiirishing Mantuan school, but over Italian art generally. His vigorous per spectives and trenchant foreshortenings pioneered the way to other artists ; in solid antique taste, and the power of reviving the aspect of a remote age with some approach to system and consistency, he distanced all contemporary competition. He did not, however, leave beliini him many scholars of superior faculty. His two legitimate sons were painters of only ordinary ability. His favourite pupil was known as Carlo del Mantegna ; Caroto of Verona was another pupil, Bonsignori an imitator. Giovanni Bellini, in his earlier works, obviously followed the lead of hia brother-in-law Andrea. The M orks painted by Mantegna, apart from his frescos, are not numerous ; thirty-three or thereabouts are regarded. as fully authen ticated. We may name, besides those already specified in the Naples museum, St Euphcmia, a fine early work ; in Casa Melzi, Milan, the Madonna and Child with Chanting Angels, 1461 ; in the Tribune of the Uffizi, Florence, three pictures remarkable for scrupulous finish ; in the Berlin Museum, the Dead Christ with two Angels ; in the Louvre, the two celebrated pictures of mythic allegory Parnassus, and Minerva Triumphing over the Vices ; in the London National Gallery, the Virgin and Child enthroned, with the Baptist and the Magdalen, a late example ; the mono chrome of Vestals, lately bought from Hamilton Palace; the Triumph of Scipio (or Phrygian Mother of the Gods received by the Roman Commonwealth), a tempera in chiaroscuro, painted only a few months before the master s death ; in the Brera, Milan, the Dead Christ, with the two Maries weeping, a remarkable tour dc, force in the way of foreshortening, which, though it has a stunted appearance, is in correct technical perspective as seen from all points of view. With all its exceptional merit, this is an emi nently ugly picture. It remained in Mantegna s studio unsold at his death, and was disposed of to liquidate debts. (W. M. K) MANTELL, GIDEON ALGERNON (1790-1852), born in 1790 at Lewes, Sussex, rose to eminence as a popular exponent of geology, and contributed many original papers to the literature of the science. Educated for the medical profession, he first practised in his native town, afterwards in Brighton, and finally at Clapham, near London. Vhile devoting himself with industry and success to the duties of a medical man, he yet found time to prosecute researches in the palaeontology of the Secondary rocks, particularly in Sussex a region which he has made for ever classical in the history of discovery. While he was still a country