Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1480 CE)

I was doing a bit of reading on the artists we hadn’t covered in lecture and found some pretty interesting works by Andrea Mantegna that stuck out for me.

 

Andrea was born in Padua, the son-in-law to the famous Renaissance painter Jacopo Bellini. At the age of eleven Mantegna apprenticed under the Paduan painter Squarcione, who was an obsessive collector of ancient roman artifacts. Being Squarcione’s favored pupil, he was urged to study ancient roman sculpture and the use of forced perspective. Indeed, he later presented an interesting view on aesthetics, allegedly believing ancient art to be superior to nature, the latter being too eclectic in his eyes in comparison to the perfect rigidity of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is a good example of this. I found  looking at his figures, many of them have almost a statuesque and austere sculptural quality to them.

 

Like Paolo Uccello he was absorbed by the study of perspective, in conjunction with giving his figures perfect, rigid forms. I found his manner of rendering faces quite interesting; in works like Martyrdom and The Lamentation over the Dead Christ,the faces of the two men below are incredibly expressive and lifelike. In comparison, Christ as the Suffering Redeemer has an eerie, uncanny valley effect, the eyes wide apart and expression unsettling. A detail segment of Camera degli Sposi demonstrates this as well, with the dwarf maid having the similar facial qualities, almost looking like the work of another artist entirely. He showed a high degree of sophistication in his use of perspective for his backgrounds, and the foreshortening in Lamentation is also quite impressive, particularly for the time period.

 

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Christ as the Suffering Redeemer

The Maid of the Bridal Room (Detail)

The Agony in the Garden (Right Side)

 

Image credits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Mantegna#/media/File:Andrea_Mantegna_-_The_Lamentation_over_the_Dead_Christ_-_WGA13981.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_Mantegna_-_Christ_as_the_Suffering_Redeemer_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rosario_Caltabiano/publication/322868266/figure/fig17/AS:598199664377862@1519633322920/Andrea-Mantegna-1431-1506-the-dwarf-maid-painted-in-the-court-scene-of-The-Bridal.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Mantegna#/media/File:Andrea_Mantegna_036.jpg