Art

...Of his time and yet beyond it—like his favorite perspective trick—he was a master of the significant fragment for the sake of an unexpected unity LEE SIEGEL Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a free-lance writer living in New York...

...When, in 1460, Mantegna moved from Padua to the refined humanistic court of the Gonzagas at Mantua, his path must have crossed that of Alberti, who visited the city several times...

...Livy had been born there, and Petrarch had lived in Padua toward the end of his life...

...It is as if the entire sacred scene were in the process of becoming a ruin, as majestic and indisputably present as the vestiges of the Roman past that surrounded every Italian...

...Scholars have squabbled back and forth ever since, Mantegna's harshest critic being Bernard Berenson, for whom Mantegna's figures "were made of colored marble rather than of flesh and blood...

...But Mantegna's most audacious meaning in this work is his most personal one...

...an inspiration drawn from religious faith combined with a worldly playfulness about the dramatic possibilities of that faith...

...20.19 June 1992...

...Mantegna's adeptness at blending together different levels of Renaissance reality—the pagan and the Christian, the cerebral and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious, the cynical and the devout—gives his work its disorienting, haunting quality...

...More than other artists of his time, Mantegna's ability to encompass and toy with all this complexity guaranteed his place in posterity even during his life...

...Grounded in a symbolic tradition, he could still express the particularity of his individual impulses...

...The entire painting suddenly turns daringly from the reverential to the intellectual and then to the highly idiosyncratic...

...A tall brass candlestick's horizontal edge divides another apostle's face in half, seemingly hiding his eyes from the viewer's eyes...

...and cynicism toward papal political power put a greater responsibility on Christian artists to interpret matters of the soul...

...But it might convince some people that Mantegna's so-called flaws really make up the essence of his genius...

...pagan motifs grounded Christianity in history...

...THE VISION OF MANTEGNA CAPACIOUS, COMPLEX & WHOLE ndrea Mantegna (c.1431-1506) was the most skillful practitioner of the illusionist perspective known as di sotto in sii, or "from the bottom looking up...

...Artistically, the city boasted Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel, whose emotional and psychological expressiveness form a line of inheritance through Masaccio and Donatello to Mantegna...

...That transformation literally climbs to its apotheosis in Christ's figure in the foreground, in which the miraculous event of his Resurrection converges with the event of its artistic representation...

...Yet his disjunctions, his cerebral games, and his ironic juxtapositions of different levels of meaning ally him in certain ways to our sensibility...

...By using di sotto in sii in his portrayals of ancient ruins in the background of Christian scenes, Mantegna pointedly puts antiquity above eye-level...

...Perhaps it is no wonder that Mantegna chose the motto Nihil stabile est nisi divinus to embellish a depiction of Saint Sebastian, as if he aspired to an art as immutable as divinity, a fixed synthesis of the whirl of diverse realities he experienced...

...Mantegna was born in Padua, a center of humanist learning and investigation...

...This, after all, was an artist who complained bitterly about the envious machinations of others, and painted the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian no less than three times...

...On a second level there is something like an allegory of creation conflated with the sacred significance of the scene: the trees sprouting from the crevices in the hill, with their triads of branches, are like nature degenerating into the death-world crosses of Golgotha...

...In his representations of archaeological detail, Mantegna paid special tribute to the religious symbolism that gave Renaissance artists the freedom to be provocatively, capaciously complex and at the same time coherent and whole...

...Yet Mantegna's self-expression bows before a universal condition...

...The virtu-i oso technique epitomizes the nature of Quattrocento art...

...In placing the opening in the rock just behind Christ's stigmatum, and fashioning his allegory of creation between them, Mantegna made his reply...

...To complicate matters even further, the sandaled feet of yet another apostle appear under the bier alongside the brass feet of the candlestick...

...With his rationalism shading into mysticism, and his mysticism sometimes disturbingly appealing to the rational, Mantegna is a representative figure of the best Italian art in the fifteenth century...

...At this late date in his career, the prickly artist was keenly aware of the general criticism that his figures were too "stony...

...Three maneuver a marble slab, two measure the shaft of a column, and one carves a half-finished marble figure...

...It expresses a pious surrender to transcendent truth as well as a transcendent pride in the ability to depict piety...

...But this vigorous new individuality rested on a bedrock of faith whose substance struggled between rich malleability and decline...

...The older man would certainly have admired what Mantegna had made of his advice...

...In his The Man of Sorrows with Two Angels (c.1500), we can catch Mantegna's resourceful irony and wit as they echo almost unheard around his devotional ardor...

...The idea of the individual stretched before them like the Mediterranean that had opened out before the ancient Greeks, tugging at the boundaries of their inner lives...

...But up until the end of the Renaissance, scientific advances in painterly perspective deepened religious awe...

...The dark burn remaining on Christ's face from his years of wandering and preaching, in stark contrast to his body's marmoreal whiteness, startlingly thrusts at the viewer the vulnerability that is in all mortal things...

...Or is it the viewer's eyes that are obscured from the apostle's by the top of the candlestick, which is shaped like an upside-down halo, the very image of encumbering mortality...

...1465-70), and Christ the Redeemer (1493), bring divinity disconcertingly close and make humanity mysteriously sublime...

...From the beginning of his career, some of his contemporaries complained about his figures' sculptural heaviness and criticized him for his meticulous concern with ancient archaeological detail...

...Bedeviled by the same obstacle the viewer and the apostle uncannily share the same experience...

...both the mystery of human psychology confronted by eternity and the human proportions devoutly imposed on eternity by ambitious human minds...

...In the magnificent Death of the Virgin (c.1460), perhaps Mantegna's finest work, subtle references to fragments and ruins ring a remarkable variation on the theme of time...

...On one level, we have a powerful expression of the mystical paradox and pathos of the risen Christ...

...Later, aesthetic innovation, scientific skepticism, and the stirrings of a modern psychology would eventually break the sacred frame of refCommonweal erence...

...In the background, night breaks up into dark wispy clouds as a new sky rises on a sea of golden light...

...From this deeply felt devotional dimension, however, Mantegna crosses the threshold of still another reality...

...In the Renaissance, the peak of Catholic tradition and the beginnings of a secular world briefly and gracefully mingled together in the arts...

...Mantegna is related to us as a sort of kindred opposite...

...It was a place rich with associations extending in several fertile directions...

...Mantegna's pictures in grisaille, where he recreates bronze and marble reliefs in paint, his evocations of music, his use of writing and theatrical narrative in his work—all this makes him positively Wagnerian in the way he sought to combine the arts and then to bury his technique in the power of his representations...

...Part of his fascination with ancient ruins came from Leon Battista Alberti, whose revolutionary treatise, On Painting, urged artists to follow nature's models and the examples of antiquity...

...Making harmonious a fast-changing world that their curiosity and sometimes ruthless will kept pulling to pieces anyway was, indeed, the aim of many Renaissance figures...

...The Metropolitan Museum of Art's current exhibition (May 7-July 12) is necessarily limited in scope—some masterpieces were too fragile to travel and others are frescoed onto Italian walls and ceilings—and it won't put an end to a disagreement that is rooted in the insolubilities of taste...

...in our culture, a hyperindividualism thins out reality as it turns mere individual impulses into universal symbols...

...The figures in The Infant Redeemer (c...

...Christ's hands are turned outward, their stigmata showing, and behind the wound in his left hand appears a gaping quarry in the side of the rock at the base of the Golgothan hill...

...1455-60), Virgin and Child (c...

...In the way he captures the movement of a ball of incense that an apostle swings over the Virgin's body as it lies on a bier, Mantegna represents a living moment of earthly temporality in the midst of a tableau symbolizing eternal duration...

...psychology reincarnated Christ a second time in the individual imagination...

...he projects the past into the future, thus using pagan finitude to prove a Christian eternity...

...The painting depicts the risen Christ seated on an ancient sarcophagus, supported by two singing angels, a seraph with red wings and robe and a cherub with blue...

...By Mantegna's time, a flux of history had pushed the representation of holy images into a busy ferment of personal styles...

...During Mantegna's youth, Padua was one of the spots where the Franciscan revivalist, Bernardino of Siena, delivered his sermons...

...On Christ's left looms Golgotha and its three crosses, and on his right two Holy Women make their way from a walled city past three shepherds to the tomb on Easter morning...

...Outside the quarry a group of artisans are hard at work...

...The ruin-dotted city dated back to Roman times...

...while the marble figure, the column, and the slab represent eternal life retrieved from death by the artist's hands...

...Yet debate over his qualities as an artist has steadily lapped at the edges of his reputation...

...Finitude and infinity shift and change places like buildings in an earthquake...

...And like all good retrospectives, or in this case semispectives, the show is to some extent a feat of translation, from a distant to a contemporary idiom...