[1] Andrea Mantegna was one of the foremost north Italian painters of the 15th century. A master of perspective and foreshortening, he made important contributions to the compositional techniques of Renaissance painting.
Together with Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna was largely responsible for spreading the ideas of the Early Renaissance in northern Italy.
He studied in Padua under Francesco Squarcione, who also collected and sold antiquities and coins, thus introducing his pupil to this field. But most important for Mantegna’s artistic development was the sculptor Donatello, who from 1443 created the high altar for San Antonio in Padua. From him Mantegna learned how to paint anatomically correct figures, how to achieve precision when tracing details, and not least how to compose a picture with an accurate perspective view.
By 1448, the young painter showed himself almost independent in style when decorating the Ovetary Chapel of the Eremitani Church in Padua (most of it destroyed in World War II).
The Triptych that he painted for the Veronese church of San Zeno (1458) reveals clearly the character of his art. The figures possess a solemn monumental quality and are remarkably faithful to antique statues. Throughout Mantegna’s art both classical architecture and perspective were continuously explored. It was then that Mantegna’s working relationship with his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini began, which was vitally important to the development of the Renaissance in Northern Italy. (Mantegna was married to Bellini’s sister, Nicolosia).
In 1460, Mantegna became court painter to the Gonzaga family in Mantua. After that he only left Mantua for occasional trips to Tuscany and Rome. Among his most important commissions in Mantua was the decoration of the Reggia, the ducal apartments in the Castello di San Giorgio. Only the frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi – one of the public rooms of Ludovico Gonzaga and his wife – have survived. The loss of the cycles in the other rooms is a reminder of the fragmentary and chance nature of our knowledge of the art and culture of the Early Renaissance.
In about 1490, Mantegna began to produce engravings of great artistic and technical perfection, which contributed greatly to the dissemination of the Early Renaissance innovations north of the Alps.
[2] Giovanni Bellini was initially taught by his father Jacopo Bellini whose icon-like method and manner influenced his early work. When Giovanni’s sister Nicosia married Andrea Mantegna in 1453, close relations between Venice and Padua were established, and Giovanni began to explore the physical and special representation of the Early Renaissance. Under Mantegna’s influence his style assumed temporarily a certain calligraphic precision: Transfiguration (c 1460).
The visit of Antonello da Messina to Venice in 1475/76 seems to have liberated Giovanni’s innermost talents. Without abandoning the rational structure and interaction of form and space, his colors gain in luminosity and depth; modulation of tone increasingly replaces the dividing outline, light floods the canvas. The landscape, as can be seen in many of his representations of the Virgin and Christ and the Pietà, achieved a quality that marks Bellini as the most important Italian landscape painter of the Early Renaisance. His ability to endow his figures with an expression of quiet contemplation while fully conveying movement and human anatomy, remains a secret that raises him above all his contemporaries.
The great works of his late art, in particular his portrayals of the Sacra Conversazione, already cross the border from Early to High Renaissance in the way artistic freedom and convention merge. As teacher of Giorgione and Titian, Giovanni, whom Dürer on his second visit to Venice from 1505 till 1507 still called the greatest painter of his time, was of immeasurable significance for Venetian art in the 16th century. More than 200 of his works survived till our days, among them 50 images of Madonna with Infant.
[3] Mantegna became associated with the preeminent painter family of Venice through his marriage to Nicolasia Bellini, the daughter of Jacopo and sister of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. Mantegna removed to Mantua, 1460, to serve the Gonzaga court, and remained there for the rest of his career, interrupted by an interlude at Rome, 1488-90, in the service of Pope Innocent VIII.