Mantegna and Icons

Mantegna and Icons
Adam Stead
Andrea Mantegna’s complex “painterly archaeology”1 has long been a focus of
art historical discourse on fifteenth-century Italian painting. A mover in
humanist circles, Mantegna, perhaps more than any other Quattrocento painter,
is largely regarded as the painter-archaeologist par excellence. His first major
project, the frescoes (now destroyed) in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua, announce,
already in the years around 1450, Mantegna’s commitment to the classical past
as the basis for a modern art. Mantegna’s almost academic interest in recreating
antique visual environments, both in style and content, grew steadily throughout his career, culminating in such works as the expansive series of the Triumphs of Caesar (1490s) or the small drawing of the Calumny of Apelles (ca.
1500). The importance of classical statuary, and relief sculpture in particular, in
the formation of Mantegna’s cool, sculptural and “lapidary” style is a commonplace of Mantegna criticism, to such an extent that the painter’s pictorial works
are often regarded more or less as a translation of classical relief sculpture into
a painterly idiom.2 Fundamentally, this is an accurate picture of Mantegna’s
painterly project. But this model of Mantegna’s antiquarianism tends to
obscure, if not exclude outright, other, no less significant strata in the “dig site”
that was Mantegna’s pictorial reformulation of the past. In this paper, I want to
complicate Mantegna’s already complex visual archaeology by introducing
another object-variable: the icon.
Mantegna is not usually regarded as having been especially influenced
by icons. In this, he stands, at least in twentieth-century art historical discourse,
in marked contrast to his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini, whose engagement
with icon traditions in Venice has been the subject of a substantial amount of
scholarship.3 No such study has been undertaken in Mantegna’s case. Mantegna
did, nonetheless, figure large in Sixten Ringbom’s 1965 book on the rise of halflength narrative in fifteenth-century painting, with Mantegna’s Presentation in
the Temple (1450s; Fig. 1) marking the first instance in which the half-length
icon-type image was “expanded” into a half-length narrative scene.4 Ringbom’s
wide-ranging and ground-breaking study was largely concerned with developmental history and, accordingly, mapped out the later Quattrocento trajectory
of Mantegna’s invention in paintings of the Presentation and Circumcision
from the circle of Giovanni Bellini, who subjected Mantegna’s new narrative
form (only tenuously established around the “iconic core”) to a process of
naturalization through which the half-length narrative image gained in psycho-
21 22 Adam Stead
logical impact and plausibility.5 Remarkably, despite the title of his study,
Ringbom spent little time articulating just which icons were subjected to
narrative expansion; “icon,” for Ringbom, was very much an image type, such
as the half-length Virgin and Child or the Man of Sorrows, rather than a group
of real icons in Italian and Northern European churches that was taken up and
modified in significant ways by fifteenth-century painters.
Ringbom’s thesis, important as it is, represents only one facet of Mantegna’s
engagement with icons, and perhaps, to a certain extent, even distorts our
understanding of Mantegna’s approach to religious painting. For, even after his
ground-breaking discovery of half-length narrative painting, Mantegna continued to produce “unexpanded” figural compositions centered on the individual
figures of the Virgin and Child (Figs. 2 and 3) or the adult Christ (Fig. 19).
Mantegna’s small-scale devotional works, in fact, outnumber his half-length
narrative compositions.6 Nor should such “non-narrative” paintings be
regarded as retardataire or backwards-looking, simple paintings destined for
private devotional contexts. Rather, these paintings, like Mantegna’s half-length
narratives themselves, must be situated within the larger rethinking in the
second half of the fifteenth century of the structure and nature of religious
painting. Indeed, Mantegna by no means restricted himself to the half-length
format: full-length compositions centered on a central figure were, for
Mantegna, an equally crucial pictorial forum for rethinking the religious image.
Half-length narrative, then, represents only one of several forms of engagement with the icon.
Mantegna’s pictorial response to icons, I argue in this paper, was wideranging and is characterized not by one but rather by various strategies for
reformulating traditional image types (the Virgin and Child, the Man of
Sorrows). First, I make a case for Mantegna’s knowledge of and engagement
with two enigmatic icons in his native Padua. I detail the range of resonances
that these icons had in fifteenth-century Padua and consider the possibility and
extent of Mantegna’s involvement in the discourses surrounding these images.
The next portion of the essay deals with Mantegna’s visual (rather than verbal)
response to the Paduan icons: what happens to these icons when they enter
Mantegna’s painterly economy? A brief final section examines Mantegna’s
treatment of the Man of Sorrows, for it is around this theme that Mantegna’s
strategies for investing religious painting with complex temporalities comes into
clearest focus.
Mantegna and Icons 23
Mantegna and Icons in Padua
To judge from the textual record, two venerable images of the Virgin and Child
in Padua (Figs. 4 and 5) aroused a considerable amount of interest among
learned commentators in the fifteenth century. The most ancient (in a modern
art historical system of classification) of the two images is a much-damaged
icon of the Virgin and Child in the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Giustina. The
medium-sized panel (88 x 53 cm) has been assigned a variety of dates, ranging
from the twelfth century to the late thirteenth; the place of its manufacture,
moreover, has been debated, with some scholars arguing for a
Constantinopolitan provenance and others, with differing degrees of conviction, for the panel’s origins in Italy, perhaps in the Veneto.7 A recent technical
examination of the Santa Giustina icon revealed that the poplar wood panel on
which it is painted was made sometime between 1020 and 1170, making a date
earlier than the thirteenth century more likely.8
Stunning even in its highly fragmentary state, the image in Santa
Giustina is remarkable for a number of reasons. The disposition of the Virgin
and Child, with the Child supported on the Virgin’s right rather than left arm,
the so-called Dexiokratousa type, is unusual, a rarity vis-à-vis the more common
and diffused Hodegetria type, in which the Virgin cradles the Child in her left
arm while gesturing to him with her right.9 This distinction, important as it is,
may be of interest only to the twenty-first-century art historian concerned with
drawing up recensions of various icon types. Certainly, in the later Middle Ages
and up to the turn of the sixteenth century, the icon’s primary interest lay in its
miraculous abilities and—no less miraculous—provenance. The earliest known
textual account of the Santa Giustina icon, in a series liturgical readings for the
feast of Saint Luke in an early fourteenth-century lectionary from Santa
Giustina, details the translation of the icon, along with the relics of the
Evangelist Luke, to Padua from the Church of the Holy Apostles in
Constantinople.10 The iconoclast emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363), the
legend tells us, in his contempt for Christianity, ordered all Christian images in
the city of Constantinople burned. Cast into the Apostate’s great fire, the Santa
Giustina icon “jumped,” miraculously, out of the fire and escaped, unaided,
over water to safety. After three days of repentant fasting by the citizens of
Constantinople, the image fell from the sky into the arms of a particularly
faithful Constantinopolitan woman. Finally, after spending the next few
centuries in Constantinople, the icon was brought to Padua with Luke’s body
during the eight-century iconoclastic controversy by a certain Urius, a Greek
custodian of the Church of the Apostles.
Thus, by the early fourteenth century at the latest, the Santa Giustina
24 Adam Stead
icon was linked with the relics of Saint Luke, even if there is no explicit
mention in the lectionary that the panel was painted by the very hand of the
Evangelist, whose relics—historically—were discovered in the abbey church in
1177.11 By the fifteenth century, however, Luke’s authorship of the Santa
Giustina icon was championed at every turn, a development entirely in keeping
with the widespread interest, beginning in earnest in the second half of the
fifteenth century, in establishing Lucan provenances for holy images.12 Writing
at mid-century, the Paduan physician and historian Michele Savonarola proudly
records in his libellus on the city’s “magnificent ornaments” the abbey’s
possession of a “panel, needing to be held in great reverence, on which the
image of the glorious Virgin and the infant Jesus by the fingers of the Evangelist of the Bull [i.e., Luke] is thus depicted.”13 The German pilgrim Bernhard
von Breydenbach, furthermore, notes in his Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam
(1486) that a “greatly honoured image . . . [with] the effigy of the glorious
Virgin with the infant Jesus in her arm, which is said to have been painted by
Saint Luke in person” is to be found at Santa Giustina.14 Both Savonarola and
von Breydenbach stress the image’s miracle-working capacities: Savonarola, for
instance, details the icon’s efficacy, when invoked by the people and taken in
procession, against excessive dryness (siccitas) and humidity (humiditas).15
The wide discursive range of the Santa Giustina icon in fifteenthcentury Padua is encapsulated in the most extensive—and interesting—account
about the abbey’s Lucan panel. In a letter to the monks of Santa Giustina, the
Paduan bishop Pietro Barozzi (1487-1507) revisits the old translation legend
(clearly still current in Padua), expressing doubts about the veracity of the
events before the eight-century translation of the image to Padua.16 Barozzi,
however, upholds the Lucan authorship of the icon, by now firmly entrenched,
and expounds on its miracle-working capacities, thus reiterating the (by now)
familiar topoi for accounts of the Santa Giustina icon. To the list of miracles
associated with the abbey’s panel, Barozzi adds an account about the appearance of the Virgin to an abbot of Santa Giustina to admonish him not to repair
her fragmentary image.17 Most interesting, however, is Barozzi’s attempt to
explain the icon’s miracle-working powers, an explanation clearly in line with his
reform policies and hostile attitude towards popular devotion to images:
It [the icon] can work miracles not in that it is a painting but
because it is a work painted by the Apostle and Evangelist Luke.
Indeed, it is plainly evident that many panels, painted by his
hand in several reprises, work miracles, among which, if yours
does something more, that is, God acts more near it, perhaps
he does this because it is located in that same place of worship
in which is located he who painted it.18
Mantegna and Icons 25
The Santa Giustina icon in Barozzi’s reformist formulation (not to be mistaken
for general opinion, against which the bishop was protesting), then, is measured
against the Evangelist’s body—it is almost, but not quite, a painted extension of
it, or, at the very least, a brandeum existing but a few meters from its point of
contact.19
In marked contrast to the icon at Santa Giustina, for whose history
and cult we possess extensive documentary sources from the fifteenth century,
much of the evidence bearing on the icon of the Virgin and Child in the
Duomo of Padua is fragmentary and indirect. A commission, “from votive
offerings rendered for miracles,” given in 1498 by the cathedral chapter to the
Paduan metalworker Anton Francesco della Seta for a silver frame for the
Duomo icon suggests that the image was regarded as miracle-working by this
date.20 The earliest textual account, itself not unambiguous, of the Duomo icon
comes from the will of Antonia Zabarella (d. 1441), whose influential family
maintained a burial chapel in the south transept of the cathedral. After recording her gift of an icon for the altar of Saint Luke (in the south transept),
Zabarella’s testament stipulates that the executors of her will are to sell a cloak
and “make two garments, namely a garment for the image of Our Lady and a
garment for the image of Our Lord Jesus Christ [which are] placed in the
cathedral church above the altar of the Blessed Mary.”21 The imagines referred
to here are generally believed to be identical with the Duomo icon. The will
thus implies that the image, if we accept the term imagines as a reference not to
a sculpted group of the Virgin and Child but rather to the figures in the painted
image,22 was already located in the Zabarella chapel (over the Marian altar) in
the first half of the fifteenth century and that the two figures were clothed,
perhaps only on special occasions, in garments of azure cotton and gold.23 That
Zabarella did not herself bequeath the Duomo icon is suggested by a cathedral
inventory from 1472 (thus written some thirty years after Zabarella’s will was
drawn up), in which an “icon painted with the entire passion of our Lord Jesus
Christ [and] with many short inscriptions” is noted above the Pauline altar.24 In
the second half of the sixteenth century, Bernardinus Scardeonius, a canon of
Padua cathedral, made explicit mention of a panel depicting the Virgin and
Child in the Zabarella chapel, where the Duomo icon is presently located.25
Thus, the icon was, at least from the first half of the fifteenth century,
housed in the cathedral, remaining over the course of the following centuries—
and to this day—in its location above the Marian altar in the south transept of
the Duomo. A relatively faithful copy of the Duomo icon, attributed by Sergio
Bettini to the Paduan painter Giusto de’ Menabuoi (active second half of
fourteenth century) may be taken as evidence that the Duomo icon was indeed
in the cathedral at an even earlier date.26
26 Adam Stead
On the basis of style, the Duomo icon is widely believed to have been painted
by an Italian artist sometime around 1300.27 Examining liturgical texts from the
cathedral of Padua, Henk van Os demonstrated in the early 1970s that, by 1263
at the latest, a painted panel of the Virgin and Child (anchona cum Beata
Virgine Maria et Filio) served as a symbolic manger in the cathedral’s Nativity
play—contrary to usual practice, in which a manger with a wooden effigy of the
Child were deployed as props.28 Noting that, stylistically, the Duomo icon
cannot be earlier than the liturgical text, van Os argued that the Duomo icon
was fashioned sometime in the closing decades of the thirteenth century to
replace the older anchona mentioned in the liturgical text.29 The Duomo icon
does indeed display curious features, such as the unusual swaddling cloth in
which the Child is bound (a salient characteristic of the wooden effigies of the
Child used in the liturgical drama), that would suggest that the icon was
“custom made” for the Nativity play.30 Moreover, the inscription in a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century hand along the lower edge of the wooden frame
(covered in a fine linen and attached to the wooden support), which reads HIC
DEUS EST ET HOMO QUEM VIRGO PUERPERA PROMO (“He is the
God and Man whom I, a virgin and woman in childbirth, bring forth”), seems
to fit perfectly with the icon’s putative use in a liturgical performance centered
on the Incarnation.31 It is, however, uncertain whether the highly unusual
classicizing arch that frames the figures of the Virgin and Child is original to the
panel (such fictive arches are known in the Veneto around 1300).32 Given that
Giusto’s late-fourteenth-century copy of the Duomo icon omits this unique
feature, the arch might well have been added to the image at a later date,
perhaps around 1400.33
There is no documentary evidence that articulates unequivocally
Mantegna’s knowledge of and interest in the Santa Giustina and Duomo icons.
There can, however, be little doubt that he saw both images, perhaps rather
frequently, during the course of his training (in the studio of Francesco
Squarcione, whose celebrated collection of pedagogical materials might have
included icons34 ) and early career in Padua. Mantegna’s stay in the city lasted
well over a decade, from 1448 to 1460, when the artist took up residence in
Mantua as court painter to Ludovico Gonzaga. Certainly, Mantegna’s work on
the St. Luke Triptych (1453) for the chapel of St. Luke at Santa Giustina, one
of the artist’s first major commissions, offered him ample opportunity to reflect
on the abbey’s famous icon and become acquainted with the multiple layers of
its rich mythology.35 An early painting of the Evangelist Mark now in Frankfurt
(Städel Museum), moreover, likely painted around 1450, demonstrates
Mantegna’s awareness of icon traditions and historical discourses in nearby
Venice, thus making any ignorance on Mantegna’s part of the rhetoric sur-
Mantegna and Icons 27
rounding the venerated icons in his native Padua highly unlikely.36 Mantegna’s
interest in and fledgling contacts with the nascent humanist culture in Padua,
headed by such figures as Savonarola, might also have provided him with still
further access to the range of discourses surrounding the Paduan holy images.37
Some measure of the scope of Mantegna’s engagement with contemporary historical formulations—and of his involvement in humanist discourses
on antiquity—can be gleaned from his renderings of the city of Jerusalem in
the two versions of The Agony in the Garden that he painted in the late 1450s.
In a short article of 1977, Michael Vickers convincingly argued that Mantegna
modelled several architectural landmarks in the cities in both paintings, ostensibly those of Jerusalem, on salient monuments from Constantinople, including,
in the London painting, the column of Justinian (with spirals rising from right
to left and not left to right, as on the historiated columns in Rome), the
celebrated Land Walls, and the Sphenodone (the round end of the
Constantinopolitan Hippodrome).38 The eastern character of Mantegna’s
painted cities is announced by the golden crescents that crown several of the
edifices, a feature that, while carrying generalized connotations of the “East,”
surely points in this context to Mantegna’s awareness of the Turkish conquest
of Constantinople in 1453, and perhaps even of the campaign, launched in
Mantua in 1459 by Pope Pius II, to reclaim the eastern city for Christendom.39
Among the monuments in the Tours panel is a monumental rotunda structure
capped by a large, relatively shallow dome, a representation of Solomon’s
Temple. As Vickers has demonstrated, Mantegna’s temple is a more or less
faithful reproduction of the rendering of the patriarchal church of Hagia
Sophia in a manuscript of the Notitia Dignitatum (1436).40 These features of
Mantegna’s “virtual Constantinople” were in all likelihood gleaned from
drawings of Constantinopolitan monuments in sketchbooks, many of which
could have been modelled on the manifold drawings made by Cyriac of Ancona
during his travels in the eastern lands.41
Seeking to explain why Mantegna would figure Jerusalem, on two
occasions, with recognizable landmarks from Constantinople, Vickers pointed
to the long-standing Byzantine tradition that identified Constantinople as the
New Jerusalem, a tradition with which Mantegna might well have been familiar.42 This answer is, however, only partly satisfactory, resting as it does on
Byzantine rather than Italian criteria. Perhaps more relevant than foreign
discourses are fifteenth-century Italian understandings of Constantinople,
which held the eastern city to be a living link to Greek antiquity. Thus learned
Italian commentators could regard fifteenth-century Greek dress as antique
costume,43 Greek-language scholarship as a vital channel of classical learning,
and Greek panel paintings as exemplars of ancient painting.44 Therefore, when
28 Adam Stead
Andrew Martindale criticizes Vickers’s argument by noting that in the fifteenth
century “the visual reconstruction of antiquity was in its infancy,”45 he actually
helps to explain Mantegna’s curious (to our eyes) conflation of the ancient city
of Jerusalem and Constantinople: for Mantegna, as for his contemporaries,
Constantinople was antiquity—one with a specifically eastern cast.
Mantegna, like his humanist contemporaries generally unequipped
with tools for drawing period (i.e., modern art historical) boundaries between a
well-worn painted panel and a fragmentary marble statue, and no doubt familiar
with legends of Lucan authorship, Constantinopolitan provenances and
miraculous abilities, might well have seen in the icons in Padua images of
imposing antiquity and religious authority. It is therefore not difficult to imagine
their significance for Mantegna’s religious paintings. This is not to claim a
simple, unidirectional path of influence from icon to “modern” painting, or to
champion the importance of the icon for Mantegna at the expense of other, no
less important impulses, in particular Donatello’s radical reworkings of the
Virgin and Child theme in a series of half-length reliefs executed during the
Florentine sculptor’s stay in Padua. The most eloquent witnesses of Mantegna’s
attitude toward the icons in Padua are his paintings themselves, several of
which—it must finally be noted—display iconographic and compositional
features that are unthinkable without intimate knowledge of the two Paduan
icons. Mantegna’s engagement with icons, however, goes beyond mere citation
(itself never the simple gesture that expressions such as “mere citation” imply).
Instead, Mantegna’s reinstantiations of the Paduan icons—and of icon types in
general (the Man of Sorrows, for instance)—lay at the heart of Mantegna’s
thorough rethinking of problems and potential of religious painting.
Mantegna’s diverse strategies for image-making do not lend themselves to easy
classification; rather, the protean character of Mantegna’s treatment of the
same fundamental themes over the course of his long career is itself emblematic of the probing nature of his enterprise.
Mantegna and the Madonna
Sometime after his move from Padua to the court of Ludovico Gonzaga in
Mantua, Mantegna painted a small painting, presumably intended for devotional
use within a domestic context, of the Virgin cradling the swaddled figure of her
sleeping Child (Fig. 2).46 There is every reason to believe that Mantegna had the
Santa Giustina panel, well-known to him from his work at the abbey, in mind
when painting the Poldi Pezzoli canvas. The points of contact between the two
paintings are numerous. Seen against an unmodulated blue-black background,
Mantegna and Icons 29
Mantegna’s figures are disposed in a manner similar to the Dexiokratousa-type
composition of the Santa Giustina icon, the Virgin’s head in the Mantegna
inclined slightly farther to the left to bring it into contact with the head of the
Christ Child, whom she balances on her right knee. Mantegna, moreover,
figured his Virgin with several physiognomic features—almond-shaped eyes
and arched eyebrows, as well as the small, pinched mouth, modeling of the chin
and tanned skin47 —that accord well with those of the Virgin in the panel from
Santa Giustina. While Mantegna’s painting is by no means a strict copy of the
Santa Giustina icon, his degree of fidelity to the Lucan panel is remarkable. A
late work, Mantegna’s Poldi Pezzoli Madonna borders on pictorial archaism;
without effacing all trace of his own invention (the swaddling cloth motif,
perhaps gleaned from the Duomo icon, and the vertical extension of the
composition to include the Virgin’s knee, for instance), Mantegna allowed his
source to speak, rather audibly, through the layers of his own painterly performance.
That Mantegna was, from an early age, keenly aware of the rhetoric
of archaism within the context of emergent discourses on what might be called
self-reflexive artistic production is suggested by his rendering of the eastern
saint Gregory Nazianzus (c. 325-389) in the right panel of the San Zeno
Altarpiece (1457-1460), the last major commission of Mantegna’s Paduan
career. Gregory, pictured between John the Baptist and St. Lawrence, wears
resplendent red ecclesiastical vestments befitting his station as Bishop of
Constantinople. The saint’s eastern origins are announced by means of two
embroidered tondi containing half-length images of two saints, seen frontally
and, in the upper tondo, “identified” as Greeks through a pseudo-Greek
inscription.48 The contrast between the hieratic, abstracted images in the tondi
on Gregory’s garments and Mantegna’s own image of the saint could not be
greater. More than markers of Gregory’s identity, the tondi clearly indicate that
Mantegna recognized some difference between his own manner and that of the
East, here a distinctly Greek East, and even sought to stage differences between
these alternative “modes,” that of the East and his own. Mantegna’s anachronistic (for us) coupling of two fictive icons to a figure from antiquity (painted in
the Quattrocento present) may even suggest that Mantegna saw icons as
“ancient art”—fitting ornaments for a bishop from the ancient East. At the
same time, behind Mantegna’s studied contrast between the “old images” and
his “new image” of the saint may reside an acknowledgement, made by
Mantegna himself, of his participation in a tradition of image-making stretching
back to antiquity. Indeed, cultivated anachronisms of this type could even
indicate that Mantegna, as well as his Christian humanist patron Gregorio
Correr, could conceive of the newly-painted fifteenth-century altarpiece—
30 Adam Stead
replete with figures from antiquity, classicizing architecture and, indeed, icons
from the East—as but one link in a long chain of ancient images.49
The archaizing gesture operative in Mantegna’s Poldi Pezzoli Madonna, I argue, registers quite clearly the painter’s attempt to balance the two
poles of “substitution” and “performativity.”50 The visual traces of the Santa
Giustina icon in Mantegna’s small painting aligned his image with the Lucan
original, thereby imbricating Mantegna’s image (and, by extension, his own
painterly practices) in the ancient and sacred origins of Christian painting as
these were formulated in the later fifteenth century around the figure of the
Evangelist Luke. Through Mantegna’s deference to the “original,” his painting
could exist in a substitutional relationship with the Santa Giustina icon. At the
same time, the Poldi Pezzoli painting bears the unmistakable imprint of
Mantegna’s invention. The painting thus simultaneously displayed the traces of
its manufacture in a late-fifteenth-century present.
The Madonna in Milan is the closest Mantegna would come to
copying an icon. In this respect, it stands in marked contrast to another
devotional painting of the Virgin and Child, likewise painted in Mantua, and
now in Berlin (Fig. 3).51 The composition of the Berlin Madonna, with the
sleeping Christ Child occupying the left-hand side of the pictorial space, recalls,
despite the painting’s possible links with Donatello’s reliefs of the same theme,
the unusual orientation of the figures in the Santa Giustina panel. Similarly, the
swaddled Child was likely derived from the tightly bound infant in the Duomo
icon. Yet, in this instance, “the disarming simplicity and effect of naturalness”52
with which Mantegna figures his holy subjects dissimulates, visually, their
relationship to the Paduan icons. Pictured without any of the traditional
trappings of their sanctity (haloes,53 “regal” garments, etc.), the figures could
easily be taken for an ordinary fifteenth-century mother and child presented en
buste with remarkable psychological penetration.54 Mantegna’s painterly
invention here seemingly supersedes its sources (including Donatello’s naturalistic treatments of the theme), the traces of the Paduan icons only faintly
detectable in the composition and the swaddling cloth.
Yet, the painting’s remarkable naturalism—that is, the predominance
of Mantegna’s performative gesture—does not mean that it, any less than the
archaizing Poldi Pezzoli image, cannot be reconciled with the paradigm of
substitution. The strategy underlying Mantegna’s Berlin painting, I suggest here,
mirrors similar pictorial processes in later fifteenth-century religious painting,
observable, above all, in Antonello da Messina’s strikingly naturalistic halflength images of holy figures. Antonello’s Annunziata in Munich, for instance,
was made in response to an icon, in this case a Lucan panel at Fermo Cathedral,
with Antonello’s composition replicating the unusual crossed arms of the
Mantegna and Icons 31
Virgin in the icon.55 As Hans Belting has argued, Antonello’s image blurs the
boundaries between holy image and portraiture: the painting’s dark background
and half-length composition, as well Antonello’s interest in giving outward,
visual form to the Virgin’s inner psychological state, allies his image with
contemporary portraiture.56 The open book in front the Virgin, however, serves
to historicize Antonello’s painting, which, Belting suggests, “transcends the
ordinary portrait by the implied narrative of the Virgin’s pregnancy.”57 In his
image of the Virgin and Child, Mantegna effaces even more emphatically the
connection between the pictured figures and sacred history: whereas Antonello
provides his Virgin with a thin halo and pictures her reading at a ledge recalling
the prie-dieu of earlier Annunciation scenes, Mantegna omits all overt signifiers
of his figures’ sanctity. The swaddling cloth alone, emblematic alternately both
of the Nativity and the Passion (the Deposition), locates Mantegna’s figures
within an “implied narrative.” Mantegna’s painting, then, breaks down even
further the boundaries between the “ordinary portrait” and sacred image, and
this may make it representative of what Belting, discussing Antonello’s
Annunziata, calls “modern icons” predicated on “radically modern
conception[s] of the image.”58 While Belting is, of course, right to point to
differences between “old” and “modern” icons, his use of the term modern
emphasizes the forward-looking aspect of Antonello’s image at the expense of
its complex links with the past. Figuring such moments as “radical” ruptures
diminishes the substitutional potency of “modern icons” by stressing the
importance of their performative (i.e., “artistic”) qualities, in Antonello’s case
his portrait-like treatment of the Virgin. Rather, the naturalistic intensification
of the holy image operative in Mantegna’s Berlin Madonna (and Antonello’s
Annunziata) might be read more fruitfully as an effort to expose and thus
develop the possibilities latent in the “old images.” That is to say: what if, for
Mantegna, rendering the Virgin and Child with a degree of naturalism approximating that of modern (i.e., late fifteenth-century) portraiture was but a means
of arriving at an Urbild, an attempt to remove the accretions to which the
image of the Virgin and Child had been subjected over the course of centuries?
In keeping with this particular strategy for refiguring the devotional
image is Mantegna’s development of the half-length narrative scene presented
in what Ringbom has dubbed “dramatic close-up.” Not only are half-length
narrative paintings such as Mantegna’s Presentation in the Temple replete with
psychological intensity, the very expansion of the single half-length figure into a
narrative image bespeaks a particularly fifteenth-century desire for more
“plausible” images—and, by extension, for more immediate ways of experiencing and partaking in sacred history.59 Stressing the particularity of the Virgin’s
almost full-profile pose in Mantegna’s Presentation, Ringbom has sought to
32 Adam Stead
locate the source of Mantegna’s image of the Virgin and Child in Donatello’s
manifold reliefs of the same theme.60 “Donatello’s Madonna reliefs,” writes
Ringbom, “made a very suitable base for augmentation in the form of additional figures consisting of symbolic heads or busts introduced into the
composition.”61 Whereas the frontality characteristic of traditional images of
the Virgin tended to negate the dramatic “augmentation” of this image type,
Ringbom argues, profile images of the Virgin lent themselves easily to expansion into narrative scenes.62 For Ringbom, however, it was Mantegna’s remarkable invention to develop a plausible historical context—the Presentation of the
infant Christ to Temple priest Simeon—within which the previously isolated
half-length figure of the Virgin might become part of a larger narrative
whole.63
There can be little doubt that Donatello’s reliefs of the Virgin and
Child, as well as ancient funerary reliefs,64 figured large in Mantegna’s conception of the Presentation in the Temple. Mantegna’s window casement may be
seen as widened version of the window frame in Donatello’s Pazzi Madonna,
serving, as it does in the Donatello, to endow what would otherwise be a
relatively flat image with depth.65 In addition to the royal connotations of the
truncated figure presented en buste,66 here carried over to holy figures,
Mantegna’s fictive frame may also betoken a fundamental anxiety about the very
nearness he has established in—to borrow Ringbom’s formulation—his
“dramatic close-up.” Yet, there are other features of Mantegna’s image that
cannot be so easily reconciled with Donatello’s reliefs. The erect posture of the
Child, the swaddling clothes and the tasseled velvet cushion under the Child’s
feet all represent a departure from Donatello’s Paduan Madonnas, which are
characterized by an interest in figuring the close emotional bonds between
mother and child. With the exception of the cushion, these same features are
present in the Duomo icon, in which the Virgin, framed by a round-headed
arch, literally presents for the viewer’s contemplation the stiff figure of the
swaddled Christ. The unusual architectural frame of the Duomo icon, just as
much as the arch in Donatello’s Pazzi Madonna, could have furnished
Mantegna with a device for containing and framing his narrative, for mediating
between the sacred event and its beholder. Furthermore, the very pose of the
Virgin in the Duomo icon—standing behind a ledge, her right arm swept over
the Child in an type of indicatory gesture, and locking eyes with the viewer—
might have prompted Mantegna both in his choice of theme of the Presentation and in his half-length rendering of it, just as the Lucan icon in Fermo, an
image type not associated with the Annunciation but later interpreted as such
through the addition to the icon’s frame of a Gothic reliquary inscribed with
the word Annuntiatio,67 could form the basis for Antonello’s compacted
Mantegna and Icons 33
rendering of the Annunciation narrative. I simply wish to make the point here
that, while Mantegna could have derived the profile view of the Virgin from
Donatello, it would not have been beyond the painter’s powers, and perhaps
more in keeping with his profound interest in re-presenting antiquity, to subject
the Duomo icon, a venerated image of considerable authority, to a fundamental
reformulation—to a narrative expansion that encourages empathic entry into
Christ’s Infancy. In this instance, “icon” did indeed lead to “narrative.”
I have been making the case here that Mantegna’s engagement with
the icons in Padua went well beyond the adoption of this or that motif. Part of
Mantegna’s thorough rethinking of the icon, and of religious painting in
general, lies in the realm of experience. We must not forget the profound
impression that the contexts and circumstances of display of ancient and
potent images in fifteenth-century Europe—the mis-en-scène of cult images—
must have made upon contemporaries. Several of Mantegna’s paintings register,
in different ways, his somatic experience of the icons in Padua. Keith
Christiansen has, for instance, suggested that Mantegna’s striking full-length
image of the Infant Redeemer (Fig. 6), likely painted circa 1455-60 in Padua,
might have been conceived with the Duomo icon in mind.68 The insistent
frontality and physiognomy of Mantegna’s Child, figured against a dark
background of variegated marbles and standing on a small marble ledge, point
up the image’s relationships with the Duomo icon.69 Christiansen—rightly—
locates Mantegna’s possible motivation for the transformation of the Duomo
Child into a hieratic image of the Infant Redeemer in the use of the Duomo
icon in the Paduan Nativity play, writing of the play that “the Child, rather than
the Virgin, was the object of veneration” and of the inscription on the icon’s
frame70 that it “would not be inappropriate for Mantegna’s picture.”71 The
veneration shown the Duomo icon in the Nativity play was doubtless a potent
spectacle, with a multitude of actors circling and censing the image, itself
covered with a cloth before its dramatic revelation to the faithful. The experiential field of the liturgical drama could easily have set Mantegna thinking about
novel ways to figure not only close-up views of individual figures, but also
expanded narrative paintings centered on the Virgin and Child (his Adoration
of the Shepherds, ca. 1450-51, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, for
example). Indeed, in addition to the Nativity play, Mantegna’s conception of the
Infant Redeemer was fed by still other aspects of the devotional cadre surrounding the Duomo icon. The azure and gold cloak worn by Mantegna’s
Child—also a prominent feature in his early image of the Virgin and Child,
shown, significantly, behind a ledge and under a round-headed arch akin to that
of the Duomo icon72 —may represent Mantegna’s awareness of and response
to the contemporary practice, recorded in the Zabarella will of 1441, of
34 Adam Stead
clothing the figures of the Duomo icon in garments of azure cotton emblazoned with golden inscriptions.
Mantegna and the Man of Sorrows
The importance of the experiential field for Mantegna’s conception of religious
painting, observable above all in his full-length narrative scenes, is paralleled
by—is indeed likely symptomatic of—his profound interest in time. In a
sensitive reading of the complex temporality of the celebrated St. Sebastian in
Vienna (ca. 1457-59, Kunsthistorisches Museum), Jack Greenstein has called
attention to Mantegna’s sophisticated sense of time, history and “the diachronic
historicity of invention.”73 Working from Peter Burke’s third criterion of the
Renaissance sense of the past, namely the “interest in causality which manifests
itself in the attempt to explain historical events on the basis of their temporal
succession and the circumstances in which they occurred,”74 Greenstein has
argued that Mantegna’s historical narratives display a probing concern with
these very same phenomena, his paintings deliberately combining “multiple
time-frames.”75 In the case of Mantegna’s St. Sebastian, time is figured in the
contorted body of the saint: the pattern of the arrows and variegated length of
the streams of blood that issue from Sebastian’s wounds record the unfolding
of his execution and the time-span of the saint’s suffering.76 The “temporality
of human experience” registered in the saint’s body unfolds within “epochal
time,” or the “natural, social or historical [time period] during which an action
occurred,” here indicated by the ruins of a classicizing arch that Greenstein
interprets as the ruins of a Roman basilica.77 The Greek inscription on the
arch—Mantegna’s signature—is presented in such a way to suggest that it was
originally invisible under the basilica’s “Roman surface.” The inscription thus
serves, Greenstein argues, both to situate the painting’s action in “epochal
time”—the end of Greco-Roman antiquity—and to signal, for the knowing
viewer, the painting’s fabrication by a contemporary painter in the later years of
the fifteenth century (what Greenstein calls the “authorial present”).78 The
painting thus “functions temporally on two levels”: painted in a late
Quattrocento “authorial present,” the image clearly fixes Sebastian’s execution,
experienced on a human level, to a determinate point in the past and articulates,
on a trans-historical level, the lasting devotional import of saint’s holy suffering.79
Greenstein’s discussion of Mantegna’s painterly temporalities offers a
useful starting point for thinking about the artist’s half-length images of the
adult Christ. These paintings, just as much as the painter’s full-length narrative
Mantegna and Icons 35
images, betray Mantegna’s attempts to inscribe his images with markers of
multiple time-frames. In his Ecce Homo (Fig. 7)—a close-up frontal view of a
scourged Christ with the crown of thorns and surrounded by four of his
persecutors—Mantegna made recourse to a familiar pictorial structure, namely
the half-length narrative form of the early Presentation in the Temple.80 As
Ringbom notes, Mantegna, in picturing his Christ with crossed rather than
extended arms, built his narrative around the traditional Man of Sorrows type
and not Donatello’s version of the theme from the altar of the Santo in Padua,
the latter image part of a long-standing Italian tradition of three-quarter-length
images of the Man of Sorrows in which Christ’s arms are presented at his
side.81 Called to Rome in 1488 and staying on through 1490, Mantegna would
have had ample opportunity to acquaint himself with the highly venerated
Gregorian Man of Sorrows in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Mantegna thus
bypassed Italian traditions, and structured his rendering of an isolated moment
within the extended narrative of Christ’s Passion around what was commonly
understood as an ancient image type. In picturing two of Christ’s persecutors
with hats carrying Pseudo-Hebrew82 inscriptions, Mantegna firmly anchored
the Man of Sorrows type in “epochal time,” endowing his scene with both
geographical (the East) and historical (antiquity) specificity. Mantegna, moreover, provided his image with subtle indications of the chronological denouement—the “before, “now,” and “after”—of the compacted scene. Narrative
time is thus inscribed in the form of the lashes on Christ’s body (themselves
also marks of the “temporality of human experience”) that point back in time
to the Flagellation; and it is inscribed literally on two cartellini in the upper
corners of the picture, which, in giving visual form to the otherwise unrepresentable auditory utterance “CRVCIFIGE EVM / TOLLE EVM /
CRVCIFIGE EVM (“crucify him, take him and crucify him”), point forward in
time to the Crucifixion. Yet, for all his interest in articulating temporal specificity, Mantegna emphasized, rather clearly, the trans-historical import of the
narrative moment, or its “devotional time.” In raising Christ’s sunken head from
his right shoulder, Mantegna opened up the canonical Gregorian Man of
Sorrows to inclusion within a half-length narrative context, all the while
maintaining the type’s devotional appeal: Christ’s full face, turned slightly to his
left, becomes, along with his body, an object of contemplation within a frozen
narrative moment, his tortured yet idealized physiognomy played off against the
hideous features of his assailants.83 The hieratic frontality of the figure of
Christ, his abstracted separation from the narrative context, the clear links
between Mantegna’s Christ and the original Gregorian type—all bespeak the
underlying substitutional impulse of the Ecce Homo. The archetypal Gregorian
image was thus figured in Mantegna’s painting as a point of mediation between
36 Adam Stead
the sacred event, rooted in “epochal time,” and the (late-fifteenth-century)
devotional present.
Another frontal image of Christ, the striking Christ as Redeemer
(1493, Fig. 8), is indicative of the ways in which Mantegna’s rethinking of the
icon was predicated on a sophisticated understanding of the complex interplay
between authorship, devotion and the ontological status of the religious image.
Mantegna’s cropped view of Christ’s bust is in many ways a pictorial equivalent
of the letter of Lentulus: Mantegna’s portrait-like image dwells on Christ’s
noble physiognomy—his well-formed facial features, his fine beard and hair, his
comely stature. The image’s pretensions to true appearance are underscored by
the inscription on the book which Christ holds in his hands, EGO SVM
NOLITE TIMERE (“It is I, have no fear”), a direct address spoken by Christ
to the Apostles both before his death (after walking on water, Matthew 14:27)
and after the Resurrection (Luke 24:36).84 The almost visionary immediacy of
the painted figure is mediated by a small red frame whose appearance approximates that of a window casement; the regal associations of this device85 accord
with Christ’s sumptuous purple cloak and red gown (with a pseudo-Kufic
inscription around the collar, thus figuring Christ as eastern). The frame both
delimits and defines the image. A vertical inscription along the left edge of the
fictive frame articulates the painting’s devotional aspect in admonishing, in the
second person plural, the beholder(s) to “mortify yourselves before the effigy
of my face” (MOMORDITE VOS MET IPSOS ANTE EFFIGIEM VVLTVS
MEI). The inscription thus verbalizes the image’s claims as veristic effigy.
Another inscription along the lower edge of the frame indicates that the
painting was offered as a gift by the painter Andrea Mantegna.86 At the same
time, however, the lower inscription pulls the image—paraded as an effigy with
some kind of purchase on authenticity—into the sphere of Mantegna’s
“authorial present.” In the Redeemer, painting’s claims to authenticity are,
therefore, not located in fidelity to a type (as they are in Mantegna’s Ecce
Homo, for instance), but rather are premised upon Mantegna’s scrutinizing
visual description of Christ’s countenance.
Mantegna’s Redeemer, like so many of his works, betrays the artist’s
complex attitude toward negotiating icon types within his own painterly
economy. The argument here has been that Mantegna felt, as did so many late
fifteenth century artists, the “substitutional pull” of the icon. His response was
varied: at times, Mantegna made conspicuous overtures to venerated originals,
whether through archaism or the retention of a canonical type; alternatively,
reinstantiation could consist of more (but never completely) “performative”
strategies (half-length narrative, for instance). Modern scholarship, in choosing
to stress Mantegna’s undeniable interest in a “pure” classical antiquity, has
Mantegna and Icons 37
largely written icons out of Mantegna’s painterly antiquarianism. To be sure,
Mantegna’s painting is unthinkable without the classical past. But it is also
unthinkable without the icon.
Notes
1 Jack M. Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 1992), 64.
2 On the relationships between Mantegna’s painting and relief sculpture
(especially that of classical antiquity), see Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna. With a
Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986),
63, and Lawrence Gowing, “Mantegna,” in Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. (London
and Milan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992), 5-6.
3 See, for example, Rona Goffen, “Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s HalfLength Madonnas,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 4 (1975), 487-518, and Hans Belting,
Giovanni Bellinis Pietà: Ikone und Bildererzählung in der venezianischen Malerei (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985).
4 Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of Dramatic Close-Up in FifteenthCentury Devotional Painting (Abo: Abo Akedemi, 1965), 72-77.
5 Ibid., 77-90.
6 Apart from Mantegna’s numerous Sacra Conversazione-type paintings (consisting essentially of multiple saints grouped around the central figures of the
Virgin and Child), only two half-length narrative images of the Virgin and Child
by Mantegna (the Presentation in the Temple in Berlin and the later Adoration of the
Magi (ca. 1500) in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, both discussed by Ringbom)
survive.
7 For a twelfth-century date, see I Benedettini a Padova e nel territorio padovano
attraversoi secoli, exh. cat. (Padua: Abbazia di Santa Giustina, 1980), cat. no. 286,
361 (G. Lorenzoni). Hans Belting (Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image
before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994], 343) and Michele Bacci (Il pennello dell’Evangelista: Storia delle
immagini sacre attribuite a San Luca [Pisa: Gisem, 1998], 318) date the panel to the
thirteenth century; both argue that it was painted in Italy (Bacci: “una tavola
probabilmente italiana”), with Belting suggesting the Veneto as the likely place
of origin.
8 Maria Pia Billanovich, “La moneta falsa rinvenuta nella ‘Tomba di San Luca’
a Padova,” in Monastica et Humanistica: Scritti in onore di Gregorio Penco O.S.B., ed.
Francesco G. Tirolese (Cesena: Badia di Santa Maria del Monte, 2003), 703 n.
25.
9 Luca Evangelista: parola e imagine tra Oriente e Occidente, exh. cat. (Padua: Il
38 Adam Stead
Poligrafo, 2000), cat. no. 75, 405 (Michele Bacci).
10 The legend is found in an account (fols. 32v-36r) about “qualiter beatorum
Luce evangeliste Mathie apostoli corpora fuerunt de Constantinopoli translata
Patavium.” On the translation legend, see Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 406. On
the Santa Giustina lectionary (Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz,
Berlin), see Mantegna e Padova, 1445-1460, exh. cat. (Padua: Comune di Padova,
2006), cat. no. 9, 158.
11 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 343.
12 On Lucan panels in fifteenth-century Italy, see Bacci, Il pennello
dell’Evangelista, chapter 4.
13 “. . . tabula illa, magnaque in veneratione habenda, qua Virginis gloriose
veneranda imago Iesusque infantis institis soluti digitis Evangeliste bovis sic
depicta iacet” (Michele Savonarola, Libellus de magnificis ornamentis regie civitatis
Padue, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. Arnaldo Segarizzi (Città di Castello: S.
Lapi, 1902), XXIV, pt. XV: 14; unless otherwise indicated, all translations are
mine).
14 Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 405, with an Italian translation (on which I base
my translation here) of Breydenbach’s original text.
15 “. . . quam [i.e., the icon] quidem et populus ipse colit, sicque ex ea confidit,
ut, aut nimia aeris siccitas aut grandis humiditas in segetum arefactionem aut
corruptionem veniens, eius solempni ac devota, qua decet, per civitatem
gloriosa gestatione, populi devotis etiam additis orationibus, colatur”
(Savonarola, Libellus [see my note 13 above], 14).
16 The translation legend continued, in slightly modified form, into the
sixteenth century and beyond. J. Cavacius’s 1606 history of the monks of Santa
Giustina (Historiarum coenobii d. Iustinae Patavinae Libri sex [Venice, 1606],
unavailable to me; see Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 406) recounts the translation
legend, preserving the eight-century translation by Urius but omitting the fire
miracle. Indeed, the epithet Madonna Costantinopolitana, under which the icon
continues to be discussed, appears to be a post-Council of Trent invention
(Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 406).
17 Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 405. From the sixteenth century to 1959, when
the first of two physical examinations of the Santa Giustina icon was carried
out, a revetment and a copy of the icon (according to G. Lorenzoni, in I
Benedettini a Padova, cat. no. 268, 361) covered the original image. Now very
fragmentary, the Santa Giustina icon seems, then, to have been damaged,
perhaps by fire, at some point before the copy and silver-gilt revetment were
placed over it (unfortunately, none of the publications on the Santa Giustina
icon reproduces the copy and revetment). The damage also appears to predate
Barozzi’s late fifteenth-century letter recording the Virgin’s miraculous interven-
Mantegna and Icons 39
tion against restoration of any sort. This remarkable miracle represents an
extremely interesting instance of early modern attitudes toward the conservation of venerable works of art. Unlike so many highly venerated miracleworking images, which were often subject to extensive repaintings, the “restoration” of the Santa Giustina icon, in a manner similar to the icon at Santa Maria
Antiqua in Rome, entailed not a touch up, but rather the preservation of the
fragmentary original through concealment with a copy, itself shielded by the
revetment.
18 Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 405, with an Italian translation (the basis for my
English version) of Barozzi’s original text.
19 In his Libellus, Savonarola indicates that the Lucan icon was located in the
chapel of St. Prodoscimus, the first Bishop of Padua. By contrast, the pilgrim
von Breydenbach records in his account of the abbey that an image of the
Virgin and Child painted by Luke was located above the very tomb of the
Evangelist. The attribution of the image to Luke and the stress on its veneration in both Savonarola and von Breydenbach suggest that both are speaking
about the same image, and yet they each proffer a variant location for it. Whom
do we trust: the local historian Savonarola or the foreign traveller von
Breydenbach? Or can it be that in the space of the forty years between the two
accounts the image was moved from the chapel of Prodoscimus to the Lucan
chapel? Such a move, by physically strengthening the association of panel with
its putative maker, would be entirely in keeping with prevalent practices of
myth-making for cult images in the fifteenth century, most especially the
attribution of paintings to Evangelist Luke.
20 An inscription, on the lower edge of the frame, reads: Ant. Franc. A. Seta.
Pat. Opus Auctor. Cap. Pat. ex votis miraculorum oblationibus. An. Salut MCCCCIIC
(“This [frame] is the work of Anton Francesco of Seta, a Paduan. The chapter
of Padua [had it made] from votive offerings [rendered for] miracles. In the
year of salvation 1498”). On the frame, see Andrea Moschetti, “Il tesoro della
Cattedrale di Padova,” Dedalo 6 (1925), 287-90.
21 “. . . ordinavit dita [dicta] testatrix quod mantelus suus de pano morelo
scuro per suos comissarios
infrascriptos vendatur et de precio ematur tanta sindon azura qua fiant due
vestes videlicet unus mantelus
pro imagine domine nostre et una vestis pro imagine domini nostri iesu christi
positis in ecclesia cattedrali
super altare beate marie, super quibus vestibus pingatur de auro videlicet super
mantelo domine nostre ave
maria in pluribus locis, et super vestem imaginis domini nostri yhu xpi similiter
nomen Jesus de auro fino,ecc.” The full Latin text of the will (Liber 2 instrum.m
40 Adam Stead
Joanis Piati [1435-1442], Padua, Archivio
Notarile) is reprinted in Andrea Moschetti, “La Madonna trecentesca del
Duomo di Padova,” in Padova in
onore di Fr. Petrarca MCMIIII (Padua: Società Cooperativa Tipografica, 1909), 2:
155-56.
22 As Irene Hueck (“Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von Padua—Rom und
Byzanz,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 13 [1967], 6) does. The
practice of “dressing” painted panels in sumptuous garments was by no means
unknown in this period.
23 Moschetti (“La Madonna trecentesca del Duomo di Padova,” 151) reports
that, in 1909, the painted figures were still clothed, and that, under the Virgin’s
modern garment (“il mantello moderno della Vergine”) pieces of a much older
garment were still to be found. The fixing of garments to the image would
perhaps explain the pin holes to either side of the two figures recorded by
Hueck (“Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von Padua,” 1).
24 “Capellania ad dictum altare sancti Pauli dotata per olim bone memorie
Re.um d num Cardinalem de Zabarellis [. . . .] Item una Anchona depicta cum
tota passione d.ni Jesu X.i multis brevibus scriptis (Cathedral inventory, 1472,
Padua, Archivio Capitolare; cited in Moschetti, “La Madonna trecentesca del
Duomo di Padova,” 156).
25 Bernardinus Scardeonius, De antiquitate urbis Patavii et claris civibus Patavinis
(Basel: Nicolaum Episcopem iuniorem, 1560), 370.
26 Sergio Bettini, “Una Madonna di Giusto de’ Menabuoi nella Biblioteca
Capitolare di Padova,” Bollettino
d’Arte 10 (1930): 70-75; see, too, Da Giotto al Mantenga, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa,
1974), cat. no. 51, unpaginated, and Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 76, 408.
27 Hueck (“Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von Padua,” 12), comparing the panel
to fresco painting in Assisi and Padua, offers a date of 1300-1320. Henk van Os
(“The Madonna and the Mystery Play,” Simiolus 5 [1971], 12) maintains that the
“Padua Madonna is certainly a work of the late thirteenth century.”
28 Van Os, “The Madonna and the Mystery Play,” 8.
29 Ibid., 19.
30 Ibid., 18. Van Os reproduces two such late medieval Italian effigies (see his
Figs. 7 and 9).
31 Ibid., 19.
32 A similar arch frames, for instance, the figure of St. Helen in the frescoes of
San Zan Degola in Venice, generally dated to the late thirteenth century; see van
Os, “The Madonna and the Mystery Play,” 9 and his Fig. 2. Both Hueck and van
Os have argued that the arch in the Duomo icon is original to the painting.
33 As has been suggested in a guidebook (Padova: Guida ai monumenti e alle opere
Mantegna and Icons 41
d’arte [Venice, 1961], 557) cited by Hueck (“Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von
Padua,” 9) but unavailable to me.
34 Scardeonius, for instance, records in his history of Padua that Squarcione
travelled (likely in the years around 1430) throughout Italy and Greece. See
Lightbown, Mantegna, 18-19, who writes, moreover, that “Squarcione seems to
have shared this taste, for an icon signed by Emanuel Zarfenari, now in the
Vatican, was believed in the early eighteenth century to have belonged to
Squarcione.”
35 On Mantegna’s work at Santa Giustina, see Lightbown, Mantegna, 401.
36 The phrase PAX TIBI M[ARC]E on the painted cartellino affixed to the front
face of the balustrade behind which Mark stands presupposes, on Mantegna’s
part, an intimate knowledge, likely gained through his contacts with the Bellinis,
of the legend of Mark’s translation—the praedestinatio—as formulated by the
makers of fifteenth-century Venetian civic ideology (the Gospel book held by
the sculpted lion on Porta della Carta, erected in the 1440s, carries the same
inscription: PAX TIBI MARCE / EVANGELISTA MEUS). For a reproduction and discussion, see Debra Pincus, “Mark Gets the Message: Mantegna and
the Praedestinatio in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35
(1997), 135-146.
37 On Mantegna’s extensive links with humanist culture, see David Chambers,
Jane Martineau and Rodolfo Signorini, “Mantegna and the Men of Letters,” in
Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), 8-29.
38 Reproduced and discussed in Michael Vickers, “Mantegna and
Constantinople,” Burlington
Magazine 118, no. 883 (1976), 683-4.
39 Ibid., 684; on Mantegna’s knowledge of the Mantuan council, see J. H.
Whitfield, “Letters: Mantegna and Constantinople,” Burlington Magazine 119, no.
886 (1977), 41, and Chambers, Martineau and Signorini, “Mantegna and the
Men of Letters,” 15.
40 Vickers, “Mantegna and Constantinople,” 683.
41 Ibid., 680, 687. Cyriac visited Padua in 1443, where here completed a copy
of the corpus of inscriptions he made during his eastern travels for Pietro
Donato, Bishop of Padua. The inscriptions were copied in the 1450s by Felice
Feliciano, who was, as Chambers, Martineau and Signorini (“Mantegna and the
Men of Letters,” 10) observe, “later to be one of Mantegna’s closest friends.”
42 Vickers, “Mantegna and Constantinople,” 687.
43 As could artists. In his Flagellation (ca. 1455-60, Galleria Nazionale delle
Marche, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino), Piero della Francesca pictured Pontius Pilate
with a peaked Greek hat similar to the one with which the fifteenth-century
Greek emperor John VIII Palaiologus was imaged (by Pisanello and others)
42 Adam Stead
while in northern Italy for the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39). See
Byzantium: Faith and Power, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2004), cat. 319, 534 n. 3.
44 On the reception of Byzantine culture in Quattrocento Italy, see Robert
Nelson, “Byzantium and the Rebirth of Art and Learning in Italy and France,”
in Byzantium: Faith and Power, 515-23, and, additionally, Anthony Cutler, “From
Loot to Scholarship: Changing Modes in the Italian Response to Byzantine
Artifacts, ca. 1200-1700,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995), 237-67.
45 Andrew Martindale, “Letters: Mantegna and Constantinople,” Burlington
Magazine 119, no. 892 (1977),
506.
46 On the painting, now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in Milan, see Lightbown,
Mantegna, 423, and Mantegna a Mantova, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2006), cat. no. 18,
102, both with further bibliography. Suggested dates for the painting range
from the 1480s (Lightbown) to the mid-1490s (Mauro Lucco, Mantegna a
Mantova).
47 The painting has been much darkened by nineteenth-century “conservation” and varnishing; thus, it is difficult to know to what extent the dark skin
tones reflect Mantegna’s original conception. See Mantegna a Mantova, cat. no. 18,
102.
48 Lightbown, Mantegna, 72.
49 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a New Model of
Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005), 403-15.
50 I borrow these terms from Nagel and Wood, “Toward a New Model of
Renaissance Anachronism,” 403-15, esp. 413. My discussion of archaism and
anachronism here is especially indebted to their model.
51 Various dates have been proposed for the painting. Christiansen (in
Mantegna, exh. cat. [as in note 2], cat. no. 41, 205) dates it to circa 1465-70, or
shortly after Mantegna’s move to Ludovico’s court. Other scholars have dated it
much later, placing it among Mantegna’s late works of the 1490s (e.g.,
Lightbown, Mantegna, 424).
52 Christiansen (Mantegna, exh. cat. [as in note 2], cat. no. 41, 205.
53 Christiansen (ibid.) notes that both physical examinations of the painting (in
1991, on the occasion of the blockbuster Mantegna show in London and New
York in the following year) and x-radiographs indicate that the figures were
never provided with haloes.
54 Ibid.
55 For reproductions of Antonello’s panel and its model, see Belting, Likeness
and Presence, Fig. 211 (Antonello) and Pl. VII (Fermo icon).
Mantegna and Icons 43
56 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 346.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 348.
59 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 89, speaks of “a need to enrich and elaborate the
traditional forms of Madonna devotional images.”
60 Ibid., 74.
61 Ibid., 75.
62 Ibid., 76.
63 Ibid., 77.
64 Ibid., 76; see, too, Keith Christiansen, “Devotional Works: Mantua,” in
Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), 154-55.
65 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 76.
66 On the “majestic” associations of the half-length portrait and parapet, see
the useful discussion in ibid., 39-48.
67 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 346.
68 Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 15, 147.
69 However, Christiansen’s observation (ibid) that the Christ Child in the
Duomo icon raises his right hand in blessing—as Mantegna’s Infant Redeemer
does—is incorrect: the blessing hand of Mantegna’s Child is thus not a straightforward borrowing from the Duomo icon. The blessing gesture is, rather,
Mantegna’s painterly interpretation of the Duomo Christ’s raised hand, one that
is more in keeping with the rhetoric of his image of the Christ Child as Saviour.
70 Which Christiansen translates as “This is God and Man born of a Virgin.”
Christiansen’s translation of the inscription on the Duomo icon does not render
the fact that it is the Virgin herself who articulates to the viewer her own role in
the Incarnation (“This is God and Man, whom I, a virgin and a woman in
childbirth, bring forth)—a significant utterance that may also stand behind
Mantegna’s conception of the Berlin Presentation in the Temple.
71 Ibid.
72 This small panel (44.1 x 28.6 cm), the so-called Butler Madonna now in New
York, shows clear traces of cropping; it is likely that the fictive arch approximated that of Mantegna’s near-contemporary St. Mark (that is, with front faces
and spandrels). See Christiansen, Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 12,
139.
73 Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative, 71-85 (quote at 62).
74 Ibid., 64.
75 Ibid., 64-71, with quote at 71.
76 Ibid., 73.
77 Ibid., 75-79.
78 Ibid., 80.
44 Adam Stead
79 Ibid., 83.
80 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 146.
81 Ibid.
82 Christiansen, Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 61, 245.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., cat. no. 54, 231.
85 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 51-2.
86 The inscription has been reconstructed as [Andrea Mantin]ia p[inxit] (or
p[ictor]) c[haritate] s[ua] d[ono] d[edit] MCCCCLXXXXIII d[ie] V Ja[nuari]
(“Andrea Mantegna painted this out of charity and gave it as an offering on 5
January 1493”). For the reconstruction, with translation (reproduced here), see
Christiansen, Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 54, 231.
Mantegna and Icons 45
1 Andrea Mantegna, Presentation in the Temple, ca. 1455, distemper on canvas, 68.9
x 86.3 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (after Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna. With a
Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Prints [Oxford: Phaidon, 1986], pl.
4)
2 Andrea Mantegna, Virgin and Child, ca. 1490s (?), distemper on canvas, 43 x 45
cm, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (after Mantegna a Mantova, exh. cat. [Milan: Skira,
2006], p. 103)
46 Adam Stead
3 Andrea Mantegna, Virgin and Child, ca. 1465-70, distemper on canvas, 42 x 32
cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (after Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. [London and Milan:
Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 206)
4 “Madonna Costantinopolitana,” twelfth or thirteenth century (Italian?), 88 x
53 x 4 cm, Abbey of Santa Giustina, Padua (after Luca Evangelista: parola e
imagine tra Oriente e Occidente, exh. cat. [Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2000], p. 407)
Mantegna and Icons 47
5 Virgin and Child, ca. 1300, 117 x 82 cm, Duomo, Padua (after Irene Hueck,
“Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von Padua—Rom und Byzanz,” Mitteilungen des
Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 13 [1967], p. 2)
6 Andrea Mantegna, Infant Redeemer, ca. 1455-60, tempera (?) on canvas, 70.2 x
34.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (after Andrea Mantegna, exh.
cat. [London and Milan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 148)
48 Adam Stead
7 Andrea Mantegna, Ecce Homo, ca. 1500, distemper on canvas, 54 x 42 cm,
Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris (after Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. [London and
Milan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 246)
8 Andrea Mantenga, Christ the Redeemer, 1493, distemper on canvas, 55 x 43 cm,
Museo “Il Correggio,” Correggio (after Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. [London and
Milan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 232)