Lodovico Gonzaga, who succeeded Gianfrancesco as marquis of Mantua (1444), was a credit to his teacher. When Vittorino took him in hand Lodovico was a lad of eleven years, fat and indolent. Vittorino taught him to control his appetite and to make himself fit for all the tasks of government. Lodovico performed these duties well, and left his state flourishing at his death. Like a true Renaissance prince, he used part of his wealth to nourish literature and art. He collected an excellent library, largely of Latin classics; he employed miniaturists to illuminate the Aeneid and The Divine Comedy; he established the first printing press in Mantua. Politian, Pico della Mirandola, Filelfo, Guarino da Verona, Platina were among the humanists who at one time or another accepted his bounty and lived at his court.1 At his invitation Leon Battista Alberti came from Florence and designed the Incoronata Chapel in the cathedral, and the churches of Sant’ Andrea and San Sebastiano. Donatello came too, and made a bronze bust of Lodovico. And in 1460 the Marquis brought into his service one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.
II. ANDREA MANTEGNA: 1431–1506
He was born at Isola di Cartura, near Padua, thirteen years before Botticelli; we must here retrace our steps in time if we are to appreciate Mantegna’s achievement. He was enrolled in the painters’ guild in Padua when he was but ten years old. Francesco Squarcione was then the most famous teacher of painting not only in Padua but in Italy. Andrea entered his school, and progressed so rapidly that Squarcione took him into his home and adopted him as a son. Inspired by the humanists, Squarcione collected into his studio all the significant remains of classic sculpture and architecture that he could appropriate and transport, and bade his students copy them over and over again as models of strong, restrained, and harmonious design. Mantegna obeyed with enthusiasm; he fell in love with Roman antiquity, idealized its heroes, and so admired its art that half his pictures have Roman architectural backgrounds, and half his figures, of whatever nation or time, bear a Roman stamp and garb. His art profited and suffered through this youthful infatuation; he learned from these exemplars a majestic dignity and a stern purity of design, but he never fully emancipated his painting from the petrified calm of sculptural forms. When Donatello came to Padua Mantegna, still a lad of twelve, felt again the influence of sculpture, together with a powerful impulse toward realism. At the same time he was fascinated by the new science of perspective, so recently developed in Florence by Masolino, Uccello, and Masaccio; Andrea studied all its rules, and shocked his contemporaries with fore-shortenings ungracious in their truth.
In 1448 Squarcione received a commission to paint frescoes in the church of the Eremitani friars at Padua. He assigned the work to two favorite pupils: Niccolò Pizzolo and Mantegna. Niccolò finished one panel in excellent style, then lost his life in a brawl. Andrea, now seventeen, continued the work, and the eight panels that he painted in the next seven years made him a name from one end of Italy to the other. The themes were medieval, the treatment was revolutionary: the backgrounds of classical architecture were carefully detailed, the virile physique and gleaming armor of Roman soldiers were mingled with the somber features of Christian saints; paganism and Christianity were more vividly integrated in these frescoes than in all the pages of the humanists. Drawing reached here a new accuracy and grace; perspective appeared in painstaking perfection. Rarely had painting seen a figure as splendid in form and bearing as that of the soldier guarding the saint before the Roman judge; or anything so grimly realistic as the executioner raising his club to beat out the martyr’s brains. Artists came from distant cities to study the technique of the amazing Paduan youth.—All but two of these frescoes were destroyed in the Second World War.
Iacopo Bellini, himself a painter of renown, and already (in 1454) father of painters fated to eclipse his fame, saw these panels in the making, took a fancy to Andrea, and offered him his daughter in marriage. Mantegna accepted. Squarcione opposed the union, and punished Mantegna’s flight from his adoptive home by condemning the Eremitani frescoes as stiff and pallid imitations of marble antiques. More remarkable, the Bellinis succeeded in conveying to Andrea a hint that there was some truth in the charge.2 Most remarkable, the hot-tempered artist accepted the criticism, and profited from it by turning from the study of statuary to the intent observation of life in all its actuality and details. In the last two panels of the Eremitani series he included ten portraits of contemporaries; and one, squat and fat, was Squarcione.
Canceling his contract with his teacher, Mantegna was now free to accept some of the invitations that besieged him. Lodovico Gonzaga offered him a commission in Mantua (1456); Andrea held him off for four years, and meanwhile, in Verona, he painted for the church of San Zeno a polyptych that to this day makes that noble edifice a goal of pilgrimage. In the central panel, amid a stately framework of Roman columns, cornice, and pediment, the Virgin holds her Child, while angel musicians and choristers envelop them; beneath this a powerful Crucifixion shows Roman soldiers throwing dice for the garments of Christ; and at the left the Garden of Olives presents a rugged landscape that Leonardo may have studied for his Virgin of the Rocks. This polyptych is one of the great paintings of the Renaissance.*
After three years in Verona Mantegna finally agreed to go to Mantua (1460); and there, except for brief stays in Florence and Bologna, and two years in Rome, he remained till his death. Lodovico gave him a home, fuel, corn, and fifteen ducats ($375) a month. Andrea adorned the palaces, chapels, and villas of three successive marquises. The sole survivors in Mantua of his labors there are the famous frescoes in the Ducal Palace, specifically in the Sala degli Sposi—the Hall of the Betrothed—named and decorated for the engagement of Lodovico’s son Federigo to Margaret of Bavaria. The subject was simply the ruling family—the Marquis, his wife, his children, some courtiers, and Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga welcomed by his father Lodovico on the young prelate’s return from Rome. Here was a gallery of remarkably realistic portraits, among them Mantegna himself, looking older than his forty-three years, with lines in his face and pouches under his eyes.
Lodovico too was aging rapidly, and his last years were dark with troubles. Two of his daughters were deformed; wars consumed his revenues; in 1478 plague so devastated Mantua that economic life almost stopped, state revenues fell, and Mantegna’s salary was one of many that went for a time unpaid. The artist wrote Lodovico a letter of reproach; the Marquis answered with a gentle plea for patience. The plague passed; Lodovico did not survive it. Under his son Federigo (1478–84) Mantegna began, and under Federigo’s son Gianfrancesco (1484–1519) he completed, his finest work, The Triumph of Caesar. These nine pictures, painted in tempera on canvas, were designed for the Corte Vecchia of the Ducal Palace; they were sold to Charles I of England by a needy duke of Mantua, and are now in Hampton Court. The enormous frieze, eighty-eight feet long, depicts a procession of soldiers, priests, captives, slaves, musicians, beggars, elephants, bulls, standards, trophies, and spoils, all escorting Caesar riding on a chariot and crowned by the Goddess of Victory. Here Mantegna returns to his first love, classic Rome; again he paints like a sculptor; nevertheless his figures move with life and action; the eye is drawn along, despite a hundred picturesque details, to the culminating coronation; all the painter’s artistry of composition, drawing, perspective, and meticulous observation enters into the work, and makes it the master’s masterpiece.
During the seven years that elapsed between the undertaking and the completion of The Triumph of Caesar, Mantegna accepted a call from Innocent VIII, and painted (1488–9) several frescoes that vanished in the later vicissitudes of Rome. Complaining of the Pope’s parsimony—while the Pope complained of his impatience—Mantegna returned to Mantua, and rounded out his prolific career with a hundred pictures on religious themes; he was forgetting Caesar and returning to Christ. The most famous and disagreeable of these paintings is the Cristo morto (Brera), the dead Christ lying on His back with His vast foreshortened feet toward the spectator, and looking more like a slee
ping condottiere than like an exhausted god.
A final pagan picture came from Mantegna’s old age. In the Parnassus of the Louvre he put aside his usual resolve to capture reality rather than picture beauty; he surrendered himself for a moment to an unmoral mythology, and portrayed a nude Venus throned on Parnassus beside her soldier lover Mars, while at the mountain’s base Apollo and the Muses celebrate her loveliness in dance and song. One of the Muses was probably the Marquis Gianfrancesco’s wife, the peerless Isabella d’Este, now the leading lady in the land.
It was Mantegna’s last great painting. His final years were saddened by ill health, bad temper, and mounting debts. He resented Isabella’s presumption to lay down the precise details of the pictures she asked of him; he retired into an angry solitude, sold most of his art collection, finally sold his house. In 1505 Isabella described him as “tearful and agitated, and with so sunken a face that he seemed to me more dead than alive.”3 A year later he died, aged seventy-five. Over his tomb, in Sant’ Andrea, a bronze bust-perhaps by Mantegna himself—portrayed with angry realism the bitterness and exhaustion of a genius who had used himself up in his art for half a century. Those who desire “immortality” must pay for it with their lives.
III. THE FIRST LADY OF THE WORLD
La prima donna del mondo—so the poet Niccolò da Correggio called Isabella d’Este.4 The novelist Bandello considered her “supreme among women”;5 and Ariosto did not know which to praise most highly in “the liberal and magnanimous Isabella”—her gracious beauty, her modesty, her wisdom, or her fostering of letters and arts. She possessed most of the accomplishments and charms that made the educated woman of the Renaissance one of the masterpieces of history. She had a wide and varied culture without being an “intellectual” or ceasing to be an attractive woman. She was not extraordinarily beautiful; what men admired in her was her vitality, her high spirits, the keenness of her appreciation, the perfection of her taste. She could ride all day and then dance all night, and remain every moment a queen. She could rule Mantua with a tact and good sense alien to her husband; and in the debility of his later years she held his little state together despite his blunders, his wanderings, and his syphilis. She corresponded on equal terms with the most eminent personalities of her time. Popes and dukes sought her friendship, and rulers came to her court. She subpoenaed nearly every artist to work for her, she inspired poets to sing of her; Bembo, Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso dedicated works to her, though they knew that her purse was small. She collected books and art with the judgment of a scholar and the discrimination of a connoisseur. Wherever she went she remained the cultural focus and sartorial exemplar of Italy.
She was one of the Estensi—the brilliant family that gave dukes to Ferrara, cardinals to the Church, and a duchess to Milan. Isabella, born in 1474, was a year older than her sister Beatrice. Their father was Ercole I of Ferrara, their mother was Eleonora of Aragon, daughter of King Ferrante I of Naples; they were well equipped with lineage. While Beatrice was sent to Naples to learn vivacity at the court of her grandfather, Isabella was brought up amid the scholars, poets, dramatists, musicians, and artists that were making Ferrara for a time the most brilliant of Italian capitals. At six she was an intellectual prodigy who made diplomats gape; “though I had heard much of her singular intelligence,” wrote Beltramino Cusatro to Marquis Federigo of Mantua in 1480, “I could never have imagined such a thing to be possible.”6 Federigo thought she would be a good catch for his son Francesco, and so proposed to her father. Ercole, needing the support of Mantua against Venice, agreed, and Isabella, aged six, found herself engaged to a boy of fourteen. She remained for ten years more at Ferrara, learning how to sew and sing, to write Italian poetry and Latin prose, to play the clavichord and the lute, and to dance with a sprightly grace that seemed to attest invisible wings. Her complexion was clear and fair, her black eyes sparkled, her hair was a mesh of gold. So, at sixteen, she left the haunts of her happy childhood, and became, proudly and seriously, the Marchioness of Mantua.
Gianfrancesco was swarthy, bushy-haired, fond of hunting, impetuous in war and love. In those early years he attended zealously to government, and faithfully maintained Mantegna and several scholars at his court. He fought with more courage than wisdom at Fornovo, and chivalrously or prudently sent to Charles VIII most of the spoils that he had captured in the tent of the fleeing King. He used the soldier’s privilege of promiscuity, and began his infidelities with the first confinement of his wife. Seven years after his marriage he allowed his mistress Teodora to appear in almost regal raiment at a tournament in Brescia, where he rode in the lists. Isabella may have been partly to blame: she became a bit plump, and went on long visits to Ferrara, Urbino, and Milan; but doubtless the Marquis was not inclined to monogamy in any case. Isabella bore with his adventures patiently, took no public notice of them, remained a good wife, gave her husband excellent advice in politics, and supported his interests by her diplomacy and her charm. But in 1506 she wrote to him—then leading papal troops—a few words warm with the hurt she felt: “No interpreter is needed to make me aware that Your Excellency has loved me little for some time past. Since this, however, is a disagreeable subject, I will… say no more.”7 Her devotion to art, letters, and friendship was in part an attempt to forget the bitter emptiness of her married life.
There is nothing more pleasant in all the rich diversity of the Renaissance than the tender relations that bound together Isabella, Beatrice, and Isabella’s sister-in-law Elisabetta Gonzaga; and few passages finer in Renaissance literature than the affectionate letters they exchanged. Elisabetta was grave and weak, and often ill; Isabella was merry, witty, brilliant, more interested in literature and art than either Elisabetta or Beatrice; but these differences of character were made complementary by good sense. Elisabetta loved to come to Mantua, and Isabella worried more about her sister-in-law’s health than about her own, and took every measure to make her well. Yet there was a selfishness in Isabella quite absent from Elizabeth. Isabella could ask Caesar Borgia to give her Michelangelo’s Cupid, which Borgia had stolen after seizing Elisabetta’s Urbino. After the fall of Lodovico il Moro, the brother-in-law who had lavished every courtesy upon her, she went to Milan and danced at a ball given by Lodovico’s conqueror, Louis XII; perhaps, however, it was her feminine way of saving Mantua from the resentment aroused in Louis by the injudicious candor of her husband. Her diplomacy accepted the interstate amorality of that time and ours. Otherwise she was a good woman, and there was hardly a man in Italy that would not have been glad to serve her. Bembo wrote to her that he “desired to serve her and please her as if she were pope.”8
She spoke Latin better than any other woman of her time, but she never mastered the language. When Aldus Manutius began to print his choice editions of the classics she was among his most enthusiastic customers. She employed scholars to translate Plutarch and Philostratus, and a learned Jew to translate the Psalms from the Hebrew so that she might assure herself of their original magnificence. She collected Christian classics too, and read the Fathers with courage. Probably she treasured books more as a collector than as a reader or a student; she respected Plato, but really preferred the chivalric romances that entertained even the Ariostos of her generation and the Tassos of the next. She loved finery and jewelry more than books and art; even in her later years the women of Italy and France looked to her as the glass of fashion and the queen of taste. It was part of her diplomacy to move ambassadors and cardinals with the combined allure of her person, her dress, her manners, and her mind; they thought they were admiring her erudition or her wisdom when they were relishing her beauty, her costume, or her grace. She was hardly profound, except perhaps in statesmanship. Like practically all her contemporaries she listened to astrologers, and timed her enterprises by the concurrence of the stars. She amused herself with dwarfs, maintained them as part of her entourage, and had six rooms and a chapel built to their measure for them in the Castello. One of these favorites was so
short (said a wit) that if it had rained an inch more he would have been drowned. She was fond, too, of dogs and cats, chose them with the finesse of a fancier, and buried them with solemn funerals in which the surviving pets joined with the ladies and gentlemen of the court.
The Castello—or Reggia, or Palazzo Ducale—over which she reigned was a medley of buildings of various dates and authorship, but all in that style of outer fortress and inner palace which raised similar structures in Ferrara, Pavia, and Milan. Some components, like the Palazzo del Capitano, went back to the Buonacolsi rulers in the thirteenth century; the harmonious Castello San Giorgio was a creation of the fourteenth; the Camera degli Sposi was the work of Lodovico Gonzaga and Mantegna in the fifteenth; many rooms were rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth; some, like the sumptuous Sala degli Specchi, or Hall of Mirrors, were redecorated during the rule of Napoleon. All were elegantly fitted out; and the vast congeries of residential chambers, reception halls, and administrative offices looked out on courts, or gardens, or Virgil’s meandering Mincio, or the lakes that bordered Mantua. In this labyrinth Isabella occupied different quarters at different times. In her later years she loved best a little apartment of four rooms (camerini), known as il Studiolo or il Paradiso; here, and in another room called il Grotto, she gathered her books, her objets d’art, and her musical instruments—themselves finished works of art.