1. Andrea Mantegna 1431 - 1506 Kevin J. Benoy

2. Andrea Mantegna Mantegna is often seen as the most important painter of the early Renaissance after Masaccio.

3. Andrea Mantegna He was adopted at 10 years of age by the painter Francesco Squarcione. He became an established master of his own workshop at age 17. He was determined not to allow his adopted father to continue profiting from his talent. The two fought many legal battles. Virgin & Child by Squarcione

4. Andrea Mantegna Like Squarcione, Mantegna loved classical antiquities. His paintings consciously integrated antique forms. He helped spark general public interest in the ancient Roman world. St. Sebastian

5. Andrea Mantegna In 1459 he moved to Mantua, where he worked for the Gonzaga family. They were great patrons of art and this guaranteed a steady income for the rest of his life. However, they were not particularly attractive subjects to paint.

6. Andrea Mantegna His “Camera degli Sposi” (Wedding Chamber) involved the painting of walls and ceilings to create the illusion of an open-air pavilion. This room foreshadowed later baroque interest in illusory work – more than a century before it became common.

7. Andrea Mantegna The painted occulus contained a joke that must have amused his sponsor no end. Diaperless cherubim perch precariously around its rim, while a tenuously balanced painted planter looks likely to fall on whoever stands beneath it.

8. Andrea Mantegna His frescoes in Padua, at the Church of the Eremitani, were lost forever – destroyed in a war-time explosion in 1944. They no exist only in reproductions and in a surviving preliminary sketch – the earliest such study we know of. It proves that, like Masaccio, Mantegna sketched the nude form first, adding clothes later. Nude preliminary study St. James on his way to execution.

9. Andrea Mantegna Mantegna took a keen interest in the new technique of mathematical perspective. His Dead Christ shocked viewers with its brutal realism, achieved by foreshortening.

10. Andrea Mantegna Mantegna was fascinated by the possibilities that perspective offered. He employed the so- called “worm’s eye” perspective to give an unusual viewpoint in many of his works.

11. Andrea Mantegna He also employed an interesting diagonal composition in the traditional Virgin & Child image. It is precisely this drive to innovate which makes him an important Renaissance painter.

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