Andrea Mantegna
- LAST MODIFIED: 25 April 2022
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0480
- LAST MODIFIED: 25 April 2022
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0480
Introduction
Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) was a central figure in north Italian painting in the second half of the 1400s: his influential manner is characterized by an experimental approach to perspective illusionism and its evocation of the gravity as well as the materiality of Roman statuary and relief. Born the son of a woodworker in Isola di Carturo, near Padua, he joined the workshop of Francesco Squarcione before he was in his teens. By 1445, when he matriculated in the painter’s guild of Padua, Mantegna had been adopted by his teacher—an arrangement from which the artist sought emancipation in 1449. He was already receiving lucrative commissions of his own; an altarpiece for S. Sofia in 1448, murals and a terracotta altarpiece for a chapel in the church of the Eremitani the same year, a portrait of the marchese of Ferrara Leonello d’Este and his favorite Folco da Villafora in 1449. His painterly evocations of antique sculpture, epigraphy, and monumental architecture gave visual expression to the cultural identity of Padua, a university town highly conscious of its Roman (and legendary pre-Roman) heritage. Mantegna received more literary celebration than any other artist before Raphael, including comparisons to Virgil and Livy unprecedented for painters. After prestigious commissions for Padua, Ferrara, Verona, and as far afield as Montepeloso (Irsina) in Basilicata, in 1457 he was offered the position of court painter by Ludovico Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, and moved there with his wife, Niccolosia Bellini (from the famous family of Venetian painters) in January 1459. In over four decades of Gonzaga service he produced a spectacular series of monumental murals, devotional paintings, portraits, and mythological works, while also designing (if not executing) a series of master engravings. A painting of St. Sebastian was dispatched to Aigueperse (Auvergne) in 1481. In 1488 he traveled to Rome to execute a chapel in the Vatican Belvedere for Pope Innocent VIII, demolished in 1780. In Mantua he lived as a courtier and entrepreneur, dealing in real estate and in textiles, and collecting antiquities, but he appears to have ended his days in financial difficulties. Mantegna was admired by Dürer, Raphael, Rubens, Poussin, and Degas, and in more recent times inspired works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kehinde Wiley, and William Kentridge. His recognition as a great modern painter persisted in Northern Italy and his prints spread his fame throughout Europe, while his reputation has survived Vasari’s begrudging but influential biography (1550, 1568) which reported that Squarcione and fellow artists had derided his “stony” manner, the tendency of his figures to emulate marble statuary rather than living flesh. A series of exhibitions in recent decades have brought about a re-evaluation and new appreciation of the artist and his broad impact.
General Overviews
Among the early monographs Kristeller 1902 remains the most useful. Kristeller establishes the limits of Mantegna’s oeuvre and provides an analysis of each work, framed by a well-informed account of Mantegna’s life and times. With the exceptions of Tietze-Conrat 1955 and Lightbown 1986—which incorporate documentary findings post-Kristeller, and debate the autograph status of a handful of outlier works—most subsequent monographs follow the same format, and repeat the same information. Longhi 1967, Fiocco 1927, Berenson 1952, and Agosti 2005 seek to chart Mantegna’s place on a timeline of Renaissance and modern style. New findings on Mantegna’s relation to the arts of goldsmithing, sculpture, book illumination, and engravings, are most accessible in catalogs of exhibitions held since the 1990s (see Major Exhibition Catalogues).
Agosti, Giovanni Su. Andrea Mantegna. 1, La storia dell’arte libera la testa. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005.
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The first volume of a projected series, the second of which (long delayed) will bring together all documents and primary sources concerning Mantegna. Includes an extended review of the 1992 exhibition in London and New York, with supplementary facts and observations, sometimes from neglected earlier scholarship. Erudite, witty, and polemical, with an autobiographical slant, often reads like a nostalgic celebration of a lost tradition of 20th-century art history in Italy.
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Berenson, Bernard. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1952.
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A dozen caustic pages on Mantegna propagate the stereotype of the artist as an antiquarian pedant who preferred statues to real bodies and “literary content” to the proper ends of art; included here because of its influence.
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Campbell, Stephen J. Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2020.
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A revisionist account of the artist’s career and the question of his relationship to 15th-century humanism, de-emphasizing the conventional association with Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura and focusing instead on humanist poetics, Neo-Latin tragedy and hagiography, patristic studies. Chapters on the artist’s materialist aesthetics, his Paduan formation, the St. Luke and San Zeno altarpieces, the Ovetari chapel, the Camera Picta, and Mantegna’s view of antiquity (including the Triumphs of Caesar).
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Christiansen, Keith. The Genius of Andrea Mantegna. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
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Short, well-illustrated introduction to the artist by one of the curators of the 1992 London–New York exhibition.
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Fiocco, Giuseppe. L’arte di Andrea Mantegna. Bologna, Italy: Casa editrice Apollo, 1927.
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A meditation on artistic geography and cultural transmission, by now somewhat dated in its conviction of the inevitability of artistic progress toward a modernity with its roots in Florence. The Florentine Andrea del Castagno’s visit to Venice is taken to be the transformative event that begins the progressive Tuscanization of the Veneto even before the arrival in Padua of Donatello in the 1440s. Reprint. Venice: Neri Pozzi, 1959.
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Kristeller, Paul. Andrea Mantegna. London: Longmans, 1901.
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Still a useful publication, drawing on a rich harvest of documentary findings from the archives in Mantua, with critically acute accounts of the major works and the painter’s career.
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Kristeller, Paul. Andrea Mantegna. Berlin und Leipzig: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1902.
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The German edition of Kristeller’s monograph has a documentary appendix edited by Adolfo Venturi. It still ranks as the most comprehensive publication of primary sources on the painter.
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Lightbown, Ronald L. Mantegna: With a Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Prints. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986.
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Indispensable critical evaluation of several generations of scholarship, informed by a deep grasp of Italian social, intellectual, and religious life; the acquaintance with contemporaneous Neo-Latin poetry and humanist thought is unrivaled. Lengthy treatment of each work in the main text with a catalog of paintings, drawings, lost works, and rejected attributions. Subsequent exhibition catalogs have modified Lightbown’s views on attribution in a few cases.
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Longhi, Roberto. “Lettera pittorica a Giuseppe Fiocco.” Opere complete di Roberto Longhi II. Florence: Sansoni, 1967.
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Longhi’s 1926 published letter to Fiocco, attacking his monograph on Mantegna before its publication, and seeking to undercut Mantegna’s importance in the history of Italian painting, while elevating that of Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni Bellini.
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Longhi, Roberto. “A ‘Pictorial Letter’ to Giuseppe Fiocco.” In Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 200–224. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015.
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Translation by Stephen J. Campbell of Longhi, “Lettera pittorica a Giuseppe Fiocco.” Opere complete di Roberto Longhi II. Florence: Sansoni, 1967.
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Salmazo, Alberta De Nicolò. Mantegna. Milan: Electa, 1997.
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A solid overview, chiefly grounded in the Italian scholarship on the artist.
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Tietze-Conrat, Erika. Mantegna: Paintings, Drawings, Engravings. London: Phaidon, 1955.
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Short monograph and concise catalog that challenges the emerging orthodoxy that (in Longhi’s words) “the style of Mantegna is born from the desire to translate the sculptures of Donatello into painting.” Controversial inclusions in the catalog include a version of the Brera Dead Christ, on linen (since 2016 at Museo Soumaya, Mexico City) and a cartoon for the Madonna della Vittoria, now recognized as a work by Antonio Ruggeri from 1797 (Mantua, Palazzo San Sebastiano).
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Primary Sources
The key period sources are Scardeone 1560, as well as the two versions of the biography by Giorgio Vasari, in 1550 and 1568, now in the critical edition by Louis Frank and Stefania Tullio Cataldo (Vasari 2008). Beyond Kristeller 1902 (cited under General Overviews), the published documentation is copious but scattered and sometimes difficult of access in hard-to-find older volumes such as Lazzarini 1908 and Rigoni 1970. As yet unpublished is Andrea Mantegna nei documenti del suo tempo, edited by Giovanni Agosti, Daniela Ferrari, and Andrea Canova, which will bring together seven hundred and fifty documentary sources.
Agosti, Giovanni. “Su Mantegna, 2 (All’ingresso della maniera moderna).” Prospettiva 73–74 (1994): 66–82.
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Part of a series of six articles published 1994–1997, includes numerous little known artistic and literary responses to Mantegna, including a series of Latin poems by Antonio Tebaldeo.
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Agosti, Giovanni. “Su Mantegna, 5 (Intorno a Vasari).” Prospettiva 80 (1995): 61–89.
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Essay on Vasari’s two versions of his Life of Mantegna, 1550 and 1568.
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Callegari, Raimondo. “Opere e committenze d’arte rinascimentale a Padova.” Arte Veneta 40 (1996): 7–29.
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Useful anthology of documents on the workshop culture of Padua at the time of Mantegna. Reprinted in Scritti sull’arte padovana del Rinascimento. Udine, Italy: Forum, 1998).
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Lazzarini, Vittore, with Andrea Moschetti. Documenti relativi alla pittura padovana del secolo XV. Venice: Istituto veneto di arti grafiche, 1908.
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In addition to sources on Squarcione, includes documentary material (81–97; 191–201) on the Ovetari Chapel and its artists.
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Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo. Idea of the Temple of Painting. Edited by Jean Julia Chai. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
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The Milanese painter-theorist Lomazzo (b. 1538–d. 1592) provides an affirmative account of Mantegna as one of the seven great artists of the age (along with Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Gaudenzio da Ferrari), redressing the prejudiced account in Vasari’s Lives.
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Rigoni, Erice. L’arte rinascimentale in Padova. Studi e documenti. Padua, Italy: Antenore, 1970.
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Important supplement to the documentary appendix in Kristeller 1902 (cited under General Overviews). Includes documentation of litigation by Mantegna and other Squarcione’s students against their teacher, along with material on Nicolò Pizolo and his dispute with Mantegna in 1449, and on Mantegna’s lost S. Sofia altarpiece.
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Santi, Giovanni. La vita e le gesta di Federico di Montefeltro, Duca d’Urbino: poema in terza rima (Codice Vat. Ottob. lat. 1305). Edited by Luigi Michelini Tocci. 2 vols. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1985.
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The long vernacular poem by Raphael’s father, court painter at Urbino, includes a lengthy section on the painters of his time, including Leonardo and Perugino, with Mantegna acclaimed as the most illustrious of all.
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Scardeone, Bartolomeo. Historiae de Urbis Patavii et claris civibus patavinis. Leiden, The Netherlands: Petrvs vander Aa, 1722.
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Contains early short biographies of Mantegna and of Francesco Squarcione, the former with the notorious Squarcione criticism of Mantegna’s stony bodies, drawn from a lost letter from Girolamo Campagnola to Leonico Tomeo. Reprint. Bologna: Forni, 1979; original ed. Padua, 1560.
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Signorini, Rodolfo. “New Findings about Andrea Mantegna: His Son Ludovico’s post-mortem Inventory (1510).” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996): 103–118.
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Of particular interest is the list of books, including texts on natural philosophy and alchemy, that Ludovico inherited from his father Andrea Mantegna.
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Vasari, Giorgio. Andrea Mantegna. Edizioni del 1550 e 1568. Edited by Louis Frank with Stefania Tullio Cataldo. Rome: Officina Libraria, 2008.
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A useful edition of the two versions of Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Mantegna; the 1568 version incorporates new observations on the artist’s works in Florence as well as Mantua, as well as the notorious critique of Mantegna’s “stony” style, drawn from the Campagnola letter also used by Scardeone.
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Collections of Essays
Most of these are conference proceedings, and with a few exceptions, like Campbell and Koering 2015, tend to deal with social and political circumstances around the artist and his patrons rather than the works themselves: Ventura, et al. 2006; Signorini, et al. 2010.
Ames Lewis, Francis, and Anita Bednarek, eds. Mantegna and Fifteenth Century Court Culture. London: Birkbeck College, 1993.
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Essays on Mantegna and Venice, on his pictorial technique, on the impact of Netherlandish art in Padua, on his relation to the world of humanism.
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Campbell, Stephen J., and Jérémie Koering, eds. Mantegna: Making Art (History). London: Wiley, 2015.
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Essays devoted to post-iconological methods of interpretation in Mantegna’s images, where the principal of poetics is understood to embrace the totality of pictorial effects—stylistic, technical, citational, symbolic, verbal, ornamental—which contribute to the meaning of pictures.
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Mantegna e Roma. L’artista davanti all’antico. Edited by Teresa Calvano, Claudio Cieri Via, and Leandro Ventura. Rome: Bulzoni, 2010.
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Papers from a conference held in Rome in 2007, following the artist’s quincentennial in 2006: contributions on the evocations of antique art in Mantegna’s work, its impact on 15th- and 16th-century painting, illumination, and decorative arts in Padua, Milan, and Umbria.
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Signorini, Rodolfo, Viviana Rebonato, and Sara Tammacarro, eds. Andrea Mantegna impronta del genio. 2 vols. Florence: Olschki, 2010.
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Papers from the conference held at Padua, Verona, and Mantua in 2006, accompanying the exhibitions marking the artist’s quincentennial. Contributions on Mantegna and architecture and sculpture, on his relations with miniaturists and antiquarians.
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Ventura, Leandro, Cesare Mozzarelli, and Robert Oresko, eds. The Court of Mantua in the Age of Mantegna, 1450–1550. Rome: Bulzoni, 2006.
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Acts of the conference held in Mantua and London in 1992, with essays on the Camera Picta, the Triumphs of Caesar, the engravings, as well as essays on Alberti, Luca Fancelli, and other artists in Gonzaga service.
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Major Exhibition Catalogues
Since the London and New York exhibitions of 1992–1993 (see Martineau 1992), exhibition catalogs have been the major venue for Mantegna scholarship. Several exhibitions (Banzato, et al. 2006; Lucco 2006, Verona 2006;) were held to mark the quincentennial of the artist’s death in 2006, with a major survey of the artist’s entire career at the Louvre, Agosti and Thiébaut 2008. There is considerable repetition and redundancy between the catalogues but generally a few essays with original and thoughtful scholarship.
Agosti, Giovanni, and Dominique Thiébaut, eds. Mantegna 1431–1506. Paris: Hazan, 2008.
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A reset to the early 20th century in its insistence on the seniority of Giovani Bellini to Mantegna and on Bellini’s more progressive and enduring influence on Renaissance and later art. Some valuable discussion of problems in the attribution of drawings between Mantegna and Bellini; illuminations ascribed to Mantegna in 1992 and to Jacopo Bellini in 2006 are here re-attributed to Giovanni Bellini.
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Banzato, Davide, with Alberta di Nicolò Salmazo, and Anna Maria Spiazzi. Mantegna e Padova 1445–1460. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Valuable coverage of Mantegna’s early panel paintings, along with artists of the Squarcione circle, and the response to Donatello in Padua in the mid-1400s. Essays on Padua’s university culture, on Mantegna and antique majuscule lettering, on the antiquarian Giovanni Marcanova’s possible interactions with the artist, on the destruction of the Ovetari Chapel in 1944 and the preservation of fragments of the decoration.
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Bellini/Mantegna. Capolavori a confronto. Presentazione di Gesù al Tempio. Edited by Brigit Blass-Simmen, Neville Rowley, and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa. Catalog of the exhibition at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. Milan: Electa, 2018.
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Giovanni Bellini’s Querini Stampalia Presentation of Christ in the Temple is shown to be based on a cartoon traced from Mantegna’s earlier version of the subject from 1453, now in Berlin.
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Lucco, Mauro, ed. Mantegna a Mantova 1460–1506. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Catalog of the Mantuan section of the three-part quincentennial exhibition. Included around twenty late works including the Copenhagen Man of Sorrows and several of the paintings in “grisaille,” but predominantly a display of followers, copyists, and contemporaries, including Francesco Bonsignori, Lazzari Grimaldi, Lorenzo Costa, and Lorenzo Leonbruno. Essays on Mantegna’s household, the patronage of Francesco Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este, the study through reflectography of Mantegna’s underdrawings.
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Mantegna and Bellini. Edited by Caroline Campbell, Dagmar Korbacher, Neville Rowley, and Sarah Vowles. London: National Gallery, 2018.
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Cautiously reinstates the mid-20th-century consensus that Mantegna was Bellini’s senior, and drawing on the findings presented in the 2018 Querini-Stampalia show, explores questions of dialogue and exchange between the two artists. Bellini’s early Pietà (Milan, Poldi Pezzoli) is shown to draw on the stony landscape of Mantegna’s c. 1450 Adoration of the Shepherds (New York, Metropolitan Museum) and is convincingly dated to 1457, when Bellini was working in Padua.
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Martineau, Jane, ed. Andrea Mantegna. Milan: Electa, 1992.
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The important exhibition held in London and New York, 1992–1993, affirmed the attributions to Mantegna of the Frankfurt St. Mark, the Sao Paolo St. Jerome, and several book illuminations, of which one—the Marciana Eusebius—has held firm. Important discussions of Mantegna’s distemper technique and of the chronology of the Triumphs of Caesar, along with a controversial difference of opinion on the topic of Mantegna as engraver.
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Sgarbi, Vittorio, ed. La scultura al tempo di Andrea Mantegna. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Valuable presentation of sculpture influenced by Mantegna, chiefly by means of the engravings; less successful in its attempts to ascribe sculpture to Mantegna himself.
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Trevisani, Filippo, ed. Andrea Mantegna e I Gonzaga: Rinascimento nel Castello di San Giorgio. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Includes a valuable essay by Daniela Ferrari (pp. 68–82) on Mantegna’s autograph letters, with facsimiles and transcriptions (pp. 136–185) along with an anthology of documents on the Camera Picta with a commentary by Rodolfo Signorini (pp. 186–198).
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Verona. Mantegna e le arti a Verona 1450–1500. Edited by Paola Marini and Sergio Marinelli. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Organized around Mantegna’s two principal works for Verona, the San Zeno altarpiece and the Pala Trivulzio for S. Maria in Organo of 1497; included a substantial display of the artist’s Veronese followers and contemporaries, including Francesco Benaglio, Liberale da Verona, Domenico Morone, Francesco Bonsignori, Girolamo dai Libri, Michele da Verona, Bartolomeo Montagna. Useful sections on Veronese antiquarianism and the local tradition of polychrome sculpture.
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Training and Early Works
Squarcione’s workshop, with its emphasis on preparing young artists to paint “in the recent manner,” and its collection of antiquities and casts of ancient and modern sculptures (including some by Donatello) had an unusual prestige, and was referred to as a “studium” (academy or college), even as his competence as an artist and a teacher were called into question by embittered pupils; see Salmazo 1993 and Salmazo, et al. 1999. Squarcione profited from the work of his best students, several of whom he exploited by adopting them as his heirs. Mantegna sued to be liberated from Squarcione’s paternity in 1449 and in 1455 to be compensated for the works he had produced. His earliest recorded work is a now-lost altarpiece for S. Sofia, with an inscription recorded by Scardeone: Andrea Mantegna of Padua painted this in 1448 at the age of seventeen, see Shaw and Shaw 1989. The St. Matthew, a bust length-portrait of the evangelist now in Frankfurt, dates from the same year, see Pincus 1997. There is a general consensus that an illumination in the Marciana Chronicles of Eusebius, c. 1450, can be attributed to Mantegna—the only attribution of an illumination to find general acceptance. The polyptych of St. Luke the Evangelist and other saints, now in the Brera, was commissioned in 1453 for the abbey church of S. Giustina, which houses the relics of the saint, as discussed in Salmazo 2000 and Facchinetti and Uccelli 2006. Roberto da Mabilia, a cleric from Basilicata resident in Padua, commissioned a St. Euphemia for his home town of Irsina (see Gelao 2013). By 1455, when Mantegna had married Niccolosia Bellini, he had painted the Presentation in the Temple, now in Berlin, which is thought to contain portraits of the painter and his wife.
Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Painters in Padua and Netherlandish Art, 1435–1455.” In Italienische Frührenaissance und nordeuropäisches Spätmittelalter: Kunst der frühen Neuzeit im europäischen Zusammenhang. Edited by Joachim Poeschke, 179–203. Munich: Hirmer, 1993.
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Although Mantegna, unlike his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini, never took up Flemish oil technique, the essay makes the case for the importance of Netherlandish painting in his formation and in that of his contemporaries.
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Bistoletti, Sandrina Bandera, ed. Il Polittico di San Luca di Andrea Mantegna (1453–1454): in occasione del suo restauro. Florence: Cantini, 1989.
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An account of the discoveries made during the conservation of the polyptych, including traces of Mantegna’s original signature.
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Chapman, Hugo. Padua in the 1450s: Marco Zoppo and His Contemporaries. London: The British Museum Press, 1998.
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Publication to accompany a British Museum exhibition on Zoppo and Paduan drawing at the time of Mantegna and Squarcione; Zoppo was a highly independent artist from Bologna whose style responds to the Paduan works of Mantegna.
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Facchinetti, Simone, and Alessandro Uccelli. Mantegna a Brera. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Includes a well-illustrated short essay on the St. Luke altarpiece and its relation to contemporaneous art in Padua.
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Gelao, Clara. Andrea Mantegna e la donazione De Mabilia alla Cattedrale di Montepeloso. Matera, Italy: La Bautta, 2013.
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An account of the St. Euphemia sent by Mantegna to Basilicata in the early 1450s; includes an attribution to Mantegna, not widely accepted, of a polychrome marble statue of St. Euphemia, probably from the Venetian workshop of Pietro Lombardo.
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Liguori, Francesco. Roberto de Mabilia da Montepeloso: prete e notaio in Padova, committente di Andrea Mantegna. Matera, Italy: G. Barile, 2008.
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A biographical study of the cleric Roberto de Mabilia, who commissioned works from Mantegna and other artists for his home town of Montepeloso.
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Pincus, Deborah. “Mark Gets the Message: Mantegna and the Praedestinatio in Fifteenth-Century Venice.” Artibus et historiae 18 (1997): 135–146.
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Mantegna’s Frankfurt St. Mark examined in the light of the saint’s Venetian hagiography and cult.
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Salmazo, Alberta De Nicolò. Il soggiorno padovano di Andrea Mantegna. Venice: Electa, 1993.
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A detailed analysis of the artist’s career before his move to Mantua in the late 1450s.
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Salmazo, Alberta di Nicolo, ed. Francesco Squarcione: Pictorum Gymnasiarcha Singularis. Padua, Italy: Il Poligrafo, 1999.
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A collection of studies on Squarcione, his historical afterlife, his surviving paintings, his art collection, and his pupils Mantegna, Marco Zoppo, Giorgio Schiavone (Juraj Ćulinović), and Mantegna’s collaborator Nicolo Pizolo.
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Salmazo, Alberta De Nicolò. “Le reliquie di San Luca e l’abbazia di Santa Giustina a Padova.” In Luca Evangelista: Parola e immagine tra Oriente e Occidente. Edited by Giordana Canova Mariani, et al., 155–186. Milan: Il poligrafo, 2000.
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An account of the devotional and liturgical context of the St. Luke altarpiece, and the promotion of the saint’s cult in Padua, which sought to rival that of St. Anthony at the Santo and even that of St. Mark in Venice.
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Shaw, Keith, with T. M. Boccia Shaw. “Mantegna’s Pre-1448 Years Re-examined: The S. Sofia Inscription.” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 47–57.
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Drawing on contemporaneous records of artistic training and guild matriculation in Padua, makes the compelling case that the inscription on the S. Sofia altarpiece recorded by Scardeone was a fiction designed to exaggerate Mantegna’s precocity.
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The Ovetari Chapel
Antonio Ovetari’s wills of 1441 and 1443 provided for the family chapel in the Paduan church of the Augustinian Hermits (Eremitani) to be “beautifully painted” and “pleasingly and properly embellished with stories of Sts. James and Christopher.” The decoration was contracted on 16 May 1448 to two teams of artists (see Shaw 1994; Holgate 2003). The established Murano firm of Giovanni d’Alemagna and Antonio Vivarini was charged with the more conspicuous portion of the work—the right wall visible from the nave, the main cross vault, and the entrance arch. Nicolò Pizolo and Mantegna were hired to paint the left wall, the vault of the apse, as well as an altarpiece “in middle relief.” With the death of Giovanni in 1450, Vivarini abandoned the project. Pizolo completed the altarpiece with the sculptor Giovanni da Pisa, and together with Mantegna he completed the decoration of the apse vault with a God the Father and Four Evangelists. Quarrels between the painters over alleged obstructions of light, and the role of each in completing the vault and the altarpiece, had to be arbitrated twice in 1449. Pizolo’s death in a street brawl left Mantegna to complete the story of St. James on the left wall by himself; his approach to perspective illusionism, soaring monumental architecture, and stately tragic narrative grew bolder and more experimental, especially in its responses to the art of antiquity and of trecento Padua; see Knabenshue 1959, Dunkelman 1980, Murat 2014. Ovetari’s widow Imperatrice recruited additional artists from Ferrara and the Marches to complete the story of St. Christopher on the right wall, with Mantegna completing the lower portion showing the martyrdom of the saint; the patron disputed the extent of Mantegna’s contribution and an independent assessor testified to the recongizability of his hand (see Warnke 1982). The Martyrdom of St. Christopher, along with the Assumption of the Virgin on the altar wall, are the only portions of the mural decoration to survive the catastrophic bombing of Padua by allied forces in 1945.
Christiansen, Keith. Andrea Mantegna: Mantua and Padua. New York: Rizzoli, 1994.
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Contains an accessible introduction to the Ovetari chapel cycle.
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Dunkelman, Martha. “Donatello’s Influence on Mantegna’s Early Narrative Scenes.” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 226–235.
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1980.10787754Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A not fully convincing attempt to demonstrate Mantegna’s dependence, in the Ovetari murals, on Donatello’s reliefs for the bronze altar in the church of the Santo in Padua (1445–1448) as well as his Florentine works.
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Hauser, Andreas. “The Griffin’s Gaze and the Mask of Medusa: Self-Referential Motifs in Andrea Mantegna’s Trial of St James.” In Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 134–151. London: Wiley, 2015.
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Examines meta-pictorial aspects of the Ovetari murals—the thematization of perspective as violent visual assault, the preoccupation with threatening masks and baleful gazes.
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Holgate, Ian. “Giovanni d’Alemagna, Antonio Vivarini and the Early History of the Ovetari Chapel.” Artibus et Historiae 24 (2003): 9–29.
DOI: 10.2307/1483758Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Important study of the role of the Murano workshop and their customizing of their normal visual idiom toward the all’antica tastes of the elite Paduan audience.
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Knabenshue, Paul D. “Ancient and Medieval Elements in Mantegna’s Trial of St. James.” Art Bulletin 41 (1959): 59–73.
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Argues that Mantegna, in his supposed borrowings from Donatello, supplemented the “classicism” of the Santo reliefs with a “synthetic” antiquarianism, drawing on early Christian as well as Roman relief and numismatic sources, together with 14th-century Paduan frescoes.
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Murat, Zuleika. “Trecento Receptions in Early Renaissance Paduan Art. The Ovetari Chapel and Its Models. Revival or Persistence?” Predella: Journal of Visual Arts 35 (2014): 11–30.
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Examines Mantegna’s consciousness of the post Giotto tradition of Paduan mural art in 14th-century Padua, and his citation of narrative frescoes by Altichiero and Jacopo d’Avanzo.
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Shaw, Keith. “The Ovetari Chapel: Patronage, Attribution and Chronology.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994.
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A comprehensive analysis of the documentation and chronology for the mural cycle, with a judicious account of Mantegna’s visual poetics and compositional wit.
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Warnke, Martin. “Praxisfelder der Kunsttheorie: Über die Geburtswehen des Individualstils.” Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 (1982): 54–71.
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A study of the lawsuit brought by Imperatrice Ovetari against Mantegna following the completion of the chapel, focusing on the testimony by an expert witness that an artist’s individual hand can be recognized.
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Verona and the San Zeno Altarpiece
Mantegna’s great triptych of the Virgin and saints, produced for the abbey church of San Zeno in Verona (1457–1459), is a key monument in the history of the altarpiece: noteworthy for its pioneering use of “worm’s eye” or sotto in su perspective, the coordination of a monumental architectural frame with the illusion of a deep receding space, the all’antica setting with richly colored marbles, grisaille tondi, coral and crystal ornaments and garlands, as well as the three panoramic landscapes of the predella with its scenes of the Passion of Christ. Much of the scholarship is devoted to the patron, the Venetian aristocrat, cleric, and author Gregorio Correr—see Puppi 1972, Casarsa 1979, Collavo 2000–2001
Casarsa, Laura. “Contributi per la biografia di Gregorio Correr.” Quaderni della Facoltà di Magistero di Trieste, Miscellanea I (1979): 29–88.
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A definitive biographical account, with documents, of the patron Gregorio Correr and his circle of humanist and clerical correspondents.
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Ciatti, Marco, and Paola Marini, eds. La Pala di San Zeno di Andrea Mantegna: studio e conservazione. Florence: Edifir, 2009.
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Documentation of the conservation of the altarpiece following the 2006 Mantegna exhibitions, with observations about Mantegna’s working process and the original installation of the work in the new choir of the basilica.
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Collavo, Lucia. “Da Gregorio a Gregorio. Ricostruzione dell’ambiente culturale della pala di San Zeno.” Arte Veneta 56 (2000–2001): 64–71.
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An account of the patron Gregorio Correr, Venetian patrician and commendatory abbot of San Zeno, and his possible identification with the figure of St. Gregory Nazianzena saint rarely depicted in Italian art—in the San Zeno altarpiece.
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Correr, Gregorio. “Gregorii Corrarii Veneti Tragoedia cui titulus Progne. A Critical Edition and Translation.” Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 19 (1980): 13–100.
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Important evidence of the literary preoccupations of the young Gregorio Correr, whose tragedy Progne was widely admired by contemporary humanists. Edited by J. Berrigan and G. Tournoy.
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Puppi, Lionello. Il trittico di Andrea Mantegna per la Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore in Verona. Verona, Italy: Centro per la formazione professionale grafica, 1972.
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Pioneering monograph on the altarpiece, the first to be properly attentive to the humanist formation of Gregorio Correr and the cultural-political dimension of Verona under Venetian rule.
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Thürlemann, Felix, and Cheryl Spiese McKee. “Fictionality in Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece: Structures of Mimesis and the History of Painting.” New Literary History 20 (1989): 747–776.
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An all too rare instance of the use of structuralist/semiotic method in the interpretation of Mantegna’s works, addressing the levels of fictive reality in the altarpiece.
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Other Religious Paintings
The best treatment of Mantegna’s devotional imagery is to be found in the exhibition catalogs, especially Martineau 1992 (cited under Major Exhibition Catalogues). Krüger 2015 presents a methodology for the study of the earlier paintings in particular, while Eisler 2006 and Steinberg 2020 deal in contrasting ways with the form and meaning of the famous foreshortened Dead Christ in the Brera. The Vienna St. Sebastian of c. 1460 has given rise to much iconographical sleuthing, e.g., Caldwell 1973, Levi d’Ancona 1977, and (most convincingly) Pfisterer 1996. The Virgin of Victories, commissioned in celebration of the Battle of Fornovo in 1495, but involving a notorious anti-Semitic incident where a Jewish resident of Mantua, Daniele da Norsa, despite having received permission to remove a fresco of the Virgin from the wall of his house, was punitively coerced into paying for the altarpiece and the church that housed it; see Katz 2008.
Caldwell, J. G. “Mantegna’s St. Sebastian. Stabilitas in a Pagan World.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 373–377.
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Interprets the three St. Sebastian paintings in the light of Mantegna’s recurring interest in the opposition of virtue and inconstancy.
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Eisler, Colin. “Mantegna’s Meditation on the Sacrifice of Christ: His Synoptic Savior.” Artibus et Historiae 53 (2006): 9–22.
DOI: 10.2307/20067108Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Survey of the literature on the painting’s unconventional perspective, reaching conclusions similar to Steinberg 2020 that the foreshortening focuses attention on the five wounds of Christ.
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Katz, Dana E. The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
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Locates Mantegna’s Virgin of the Victories and the anti-Semitic abuses leading to its commission in a series of monumental religious works brought into being at the behest of Italian princes otherwise noted for their protection of the Jews. Argues that Mantegna’s altarpiece constitutes a form of “symbolic violence” against the Jews, and that such surrogate violence fulfilled doctrinal, political, and psychological needs on the part of their Christian patrons.
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Krüger, Klaus. “Andrea Mantegna: Painting’s Mediality.” In Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 22–54. London: Wiley, 2015.
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A revised version of a chapter from his 2001 book Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren, Krüger’s essay explores Mantegna’s engagement with typologies of the sacred image, and on how framing effects draw attention to the mediated nature of the image. Such framing effects (lintels, arches, etc.) emphasize the imperatives of “witholding” and “making present” which operate in the Christian icon.
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Levi d’Ancona, M. “An Image Not Made by Chance. The Vienna St. Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna.” In Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss. Edited by I. Lavin and J. Plummer, 98–114. New York: New York University Press, 1977.
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Connects the enigmatic figure of a horseman in the clouds with the relief of the legend of Theodoric on the facade of San Zeno, and hence with medieval legends of the heretical emperor.
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Pfisterer, Ulrich. “Künstlerische potestas audendi und licentia im Quattrocento: Benozzo Gozzoli, Andrea Mantegna, Bertoldo di Giovanni.” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 31 (1996): 109–147.
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Illuminating observations on the funerary chapel and above all the imagery of ruin and cloud-figures in the Vienna St. Sebastian, noting the association in Prudentius, Against Symmachus, between the veneration of marble and bronze images that decay over time with the pagan cult of demonic phantoms of the air.
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Steinberg, Leo. “Mantegna’s Dead Christ: Passion and Pattern.” In Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays. Edited by Sheila Schwartz, 87–96. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
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A lecture presented during the 1990s but unpublished until 2020. Proposes that the impact of this famous work depends on the tension between the painstaking, objectifying description of the ravaged body and the manipulation of perspectival logic to present the wounds of Christ as a symbolic pentagram or “seal of salvation.”
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Ventura, Leandro. “La religione privata: Ludovico II, Andrea Mantegna e la Cappella del Castello di San Giorgio.” Quaderni di Palazzo Te 7 (1987): 23–34.
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A study of the three panels in the Uffizi—The Adoration of the Magi, The Circumcision of Christ, the Ascension of Christ, and the Prado panel of The Dormition of the Virgin—and their probable provenance from the private chapel of Ludovico Gonzaga, focusing on Mantegna’s response to Byzantine art.
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The Camera Picta
Mantegna worked from 1465 to 1474 on the decoration of a grand reception room in the apartment of the marquess Ludovico Gonzaga in the signorial residence at Mantua. On the fireplace wall Ludovico, portrayed as if seated on an open terrace, receives a letter, while close by appear his consort Barbara of Brandenburg, their sons and daughters, and their retinue. On the adjacent wall the young Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga is portrayed frontally against an idealized view of the city of Rome, hailed by his father Ludovico and in company with his eldest brother, his nephews, and two foreign princes: the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and King Christian I of Denmark. The intensely descriptive character of the portraits and landscapes is combined with an elegant all’antica architectural framing, including a vault decorated with portraits of the first eight Caesars, mythological scenes, and an illusionistic oculus from which winged genii seem posed to descend into the room like similar spirits who bear Mantegna’s elegant Latin dedication over the door; see Campbell 2015. While earlier scholarship sought the “hidden meaning” or literary program of the decoration—for instance, Mulazzani 1978 and Signorini 1985—Martindale 1997 treats the Camera in typological terms, Arasse 1987 and Starn and Partridge 1992 explore its political function, Koering 2015 analyzes Mantegna’s visual poetics, while Dunlop 2009 explores its genealogical relation to earlier courtly wall-decorations with portraits, a kind of princely commission well documented in Italy by the mid-1400s although relatively few examples survive.
Arasse, Daniel. “Il programma politico della Camera degli Sposi, ovvero il segreto dell’immortalita.” Quaderni di Palazzo Te 6 (1987): 47–64.
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Develops the argument of Mulazzani 1978 that the program is based in ideals of open and transparent princely government in Pliny the Younger’s Panegyric on Trajan, but analyzing a counter-logic in the fictive space’s liminal zones, signifying that prudent rule respects the principal of “secrets of power.”
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Campbell, Stephen J. “Mantegna’s Camera Picta: Visuality and Pathos.” In Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 114–134. London: Wiley, 2015.
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Argues that the painting embeds princely portraiture in a poetical dialectic, confronting it with mythological exemplars of the pathos such portraiture had normally excluded, and that Mantegna supplements perspective virtuosity with embodied personifications of spiriti visivi in the form of winged Erotes. Mantegna resists a particular Albertian dispensation of pictura defined entirely by the geometric character of vision.
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Dunlop, Anne. Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.
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The concluding chapter treats the Camera Picta in terms of its consistency with a preceding century of secular decoration (e.g., the Palazzo Minerbi-Del Sale in Ferrara and the Castle of Sabbionara d’Avio near Verona). Earlier decorations had also combined a similar array of illusionistic effects—figures partly visible behind curtains, architectural structures that appeared to extend or extend into the room—with imagery drawn from vernacular love poetry.
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Kemp, Martin. Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
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Insists that the room’s documented function as a princely audience chamber determines the character of the decoration—that the imagery should be seen as a diplomatically styled fashioning of the Gonzaga as well-connected dynasts with kinship ties to European rulers and a foothold in the papal court, as a model family at the center of an ideal courtly society, and as cultivated patrons with intellectual tastes. Such a view opposes itself to interpretations grounded in abstruse symbolism or that see the murals as documentation of specific events.
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Koering, Jérémie. “Changing Forms: Mantegna’s Poietics in the Camera Picta.” In Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 94–112. London: Wiley, 2015.
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Explores Mantegna’s “vegetal” self-portrait in the leafy ornament of a pilaster as a figuration of the generative power of the artist and a reflection on the porosity between art and nature.
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Martindale, Andrew. “Mantegna’s ‘Camera Picta’ as Wall Decoration.” In La Corte di Mantova nell’età di Andrea Mantegna 1450–1550/The Court of the Gonzaga in the Age of Mantegna, 1450–1550. Edited by Cesare Mozzarelli, Robert Oresko, and Leandro Ventura, 179–186. Rome: Bulzoni, 1997.
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An attempt at a “common sense” approach, by way of an alternative to iconological sleuthing.
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Mulazzani, Germano. “La fonte letteraria della Camera degli Sposi di Mantegna.” Arte Lombarda 50 (1978): 33–46.
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Proposes that the program for the imagery is drawn from Pliny the Younger’s panegyric on the emperor Trajan, where the celebration of the prince is based on the visibility of his inner life and the complete harmony and consistency of public and private life: “nihil occultum esse patitur” (nothing appears to be hidden).
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Signorini, Rodolfo. Opus Hoc Tenue: La Camera Dipinta di Andrea Mantegna: Lettura Storica, Iconografica e Iconologica. Parma, Italy: Artegrafica Silva, 1985.
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In this influential, richly documented, and much-debated analysis the murals are regarded as a combination of propaganda and historical documentary, supposedly recording the events of 1 January 1462, when marchese Ludovico Gonzaga was summoned to Milan by Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Signorini claims to have found the very letter that Ludovico holds in Mantegna’s painting). Also suggests that Mantegna’s work is a painted panegyric not only of a ruling dynasty but of art itself, based on the paragone of visual and verbal eloquence in the sophist Lucian’s celebration of a gorgeously decorated room.
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Starn, Randolph, and Loren Partridge. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992.
DOI: 10.1525/9780520328785Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The Camera Picta is the subject of one chapter. Argues that the dominant “pictorial technologies” of late quattrocento—illusionism, perspective, classical style—correspond to the leading ideas of political culture. The address to the beholder in the conventions of art itself—in perspective, in illusionistic representation, in portraiture, in antiquarian decoration—can all be conceived in terms of relations of power.
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The Triumphs of Caesar
The series of nine large canvasses known as the Triumphs of Caesar was painted over a span of years probably beginning around 1486 and concluding around 1501. This was for several centuries the most famous work by the artist, its fame ensured by reproductive prints and in early art literature. Removed from Mantua to England in 1629 and installed at Hampton court, the canvasses were heavily damaged by early attempts at restoration, including that of the first canvas by Roger Fry (1910–c. 1921). Much of the scholarship concerns the question of patronage—Ludovico Gonzaga, his successor Federico, and Federico’s son and successor Francesco have all been proposed as initiators of the commission. Tosetti Grandi 2008; Chambers 2010; and Bourne 2008 all discuss questions of patronage; others, such as Martindale 1979 and Halliday 1994, have sought to reconstruct Mantegna’s literary sources, differing on the importance of Flavio Biondo’s Roma Triumphans, and his borrowings from antique art (of which there are notably few). It is suggested, for instance, by Bourne 2008 that he emphasizes on Caesar’s Gallic Triumph may have been prompted by Francesco Gonzaga’s victory against invading French forces at Fornovo in 1495. The status of the series as Gonzaga dynastic propaganda has been questioned by Halliday 1994 and Campbell 2004. So, too, might the general tone of celebration, given the overall sense of melancholy, the repeated emphasis on plunder and violence, and the specter of Caesar’s impending murder.
Arlt, Thomas. Andrea Mantegna, Triumph Caesars: ein Meisterwerk der Renaissance in neuem Licht. Vienna: Böhlau, 2005.
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Provides a useful discussion of prints, copies, and later versions.
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Bourne, Molly. Francesco II Gonzaga: The Soldier-Prince as Patron. Rome: Bulzoni, 2008.
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Considers the marchese Francesco II as a likely patron of the Triumphs, with a detailed consideration of his Palazzo di San Sebastiano where they were eventually installed.
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Campbell, Stephen J. “Mantegna’s Triumph: The Cultural Politics of Imitation all’antica at the court of Mantua, 1490–1530.” In Artists at Court: Image Making and Identity 100–1550. Edited by Stephen J. Campbell, 91–106. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004.
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The series, with its solemn processional movement of warriors, prisoners, weapons, plundered treasure and art objects, is viewed as a taking stock by Mantegna of his life’s work as an artist, the modern cult of antiquity, and a meditation on the place of painting among other fields of human endeavor—including warfare and the mechanical arts.
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Chambers, David. “Il marchese Federico I Gonzaga (1441–1484) e Il Trionfo di Giulio Cesare di Andrea Mantegna.” In Andrea Mantegna impronta del genio. Convegno internazionale di studi : Padova, Verona, Mantova, 8, 9, 10 Novembre 2006. 2 vols. Vol. 2. Edited by Rodolfo Signorini, Viviana Rebonato, Sara Tammaccaro, Elga Disperdi, and Ines Mazzola, 507–520. Florence: Olschki, 2010.
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Examines the case for the marchese Federico Gonzaga, who ruled Mantua from 1478–1484, as the patron of the series.
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Cocke, Richard. “The Changing Face of the Temple of Janus in Mantegna’s The Prisoners: Politics and the Patronage of the Triumphs of Caesar.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 55 (1992): 268–274.
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An examination of the drawing for The Senators—a subject ultimately abandoned by Mantegna in favor of The Prisoners—which depicted the Temple of Janus with its door closed. Concludes that the series was hence begun in a time of peace, probably in the reign of Ludovico Gonzaga in the years after the 1454 Peace of Lodi, before the decades of strife that began in 1476.
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Halliday, Anthony. “The Literary Sources of Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar.” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 24 (1994): 337–396.
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Insightful account of the pessimism and pathos of the series and the role of Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paulus in its conception: the text underlies the replacement of a planned canvas depicting Roman senators and its late substitution with a group of captives.
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Hope, Charles. “The Chronology of Mantegna’s Triumphs.” In Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth. Vol. 2. Edited by Andrew Morrogh, 297–309. 2 vols. Florence: Olschki, 1985.
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Makes a convincing case for the execution of the cycle in three phases, beginning with the final three canvases in the sequence (1480s), then the first three (early 1490s), then the second three (late 1490s and c. 1500).
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Martindale, Andrew. The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court. London: Phaidon, 1979.
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A near-definitive and detailed study of the cycle and its intellectual and political context, with a catalogue of the nine canvases.
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Tosetti Grandi, Paola. I trionfi di Cesare di Andrea Mantegna: fonti umanistiche e cultura antiquaria alla corte dei Gonzaga. Mantua, Italy: Sometti, 2008.
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Conceives the cycle as a manifestation of the crusading ideology following the 1459 Council of Mantua, and argues that Ludovico Gonzaga initiated the commission.
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Vowles, Sarah. “New Light on Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar.” Master Drawings 57 (2019): 33–47.
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Study of the recently discovered study for the second canvas of the Triumphs, making a comprehensive case for its attribution to Mantegna.
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Mythologies
When Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua, resolved in 1496 to decorate her private study (studiolo) with pictures on mythological themes (favole), she turned first to Mantegna, and sought additional favole from Bellini, Perugino, Lorenzo Costa, and others. The best overview of the patron and her collecting is Ferino Pagden 1994. Most of the material below discusses questions of program and invention. Though Bellini and Perugino, both working outside of Mantua, received detailed sets of instructions, it is possible that Mantegna—known from his print designs as an inventor of mythological imagery—could have devised his own subjects, perhaps in consultation with Paride da Ceresara as suggested in Verheyen 1971 and developed in Campbell 2006. In the literature Mantegna’s two paintings have suffered from prejudicial views of the interfering patron concerned with publicizing her erudition and virtues as a ruler and spouse. Others—Gombrich 1963, Hauser 2000, Cody 2017—emphasize their philosophical and edifying character. However, the so-called Parnassus, which depicts the triumphantly adulterous Mars and Venus and the jealous Vulcan raging in his forge, has little to do with conjugal virtue, as noted by Wind 1949, and Jones 1981. The subject was a byword for the morally ambiguous character of secular poetry. Mars and Venus preside over a realm populated by gods and mythic symbols associated with eloquence, poetry, and harmony: Apollo and the Muses, Mercury with Pegasus, and the Hippocrene Spring. The second painting, known as Pallas Expelling the Vices, stimulates reflection on the question of order, decorum, and fixed limits in both art and nature. The painting also presents warnings against excess in both art and nature: for just as nature can also generate the monstrous, the freakish, and the strange—we see hermaphrodites, part animal and part human creatures, trees with human features—so the human imagination can create nonsensical and chimerical fantasies. Thus Pallas, goddess of Prudence, arrives to rescue Wisdom, the mother of the Virtues, who has been imprisoned in a tomb-like structure. Eros and his freakish minions are scattered at her approach.
Campbell, Stephen J. The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006.
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An account of the rise of mythological painting and its relation to humanist preoccupations with the ethics of reading, the nature of poetic invention, and the relationship between reading and collecting. Argues for the shared agency of the artist in devising the inventions for his two fables, drawing on his reading of Pliny the Elder (available in Italian since the 1480s) and his acquaintance with the poets Battista Fiera, Battista Spagnoli (Mantovano), and Paride da Ceresara.
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Cody, Steven J. “Mantegna and the Orators: The Invention of the ‘Mars and Venus’ for Isabella d’Este-Gonzaga.” Artibus et Historiae 75 (2017): 50–77.
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A new assessment of the role of Paride da Ceresara and his use of Plato and Neoplatonic sources in the inventions for Isabella’s studiolo.
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Ferino Pagden, Sylvia, ed. “La Prima Donna del mondo.” Isabella d’Este, Fürstin und mäzenatin der Renaissance. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1994.
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Comprehensive exhibition on the patronage, collecting, and intellectual world of Isabella d’Este.
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Gombrich, Ernst. “An Interpretation of Mantegna’s Parnassus.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 196–198.
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Associates the invention of the picture with a text in defense of Homer by the 1st-century CE rhetorician Heraclitus; rather than slandering the gods with his scandalous account of the adultery of Mars and Venus, Heraclitus argues, Homer was offering an allegory of the birth of Harmony from the union of strife and love. The text of Heraclitus was published in 1505.
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Hauser, Andreas. “Andrea Mantegnas Parnass. Ein programmbild orphischen Künstlertums.” Pantheon 58 (2000): 23–44.
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The Parnassus as an “Orphic” (Neoplatonic) allegory, based on one early identification of the figure of Apollo as Orpheus.
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Jones, Roger. “What Venus Did with Mars: Battista Fiera and Mantegna’s Parnassus.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 193–198.
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A study of the humorous and decidedly non-moralizing poem written by Fiera after he had ill-advisedly identified Isabella d’Este in the figure of Venus in the Parnassus.
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Lehmann, Phyllis W. “The Sources and Meaning of Mantegna’s Parnassus.” In Samothracian Reflections. Aspects of the Revival of the Antique. By Phyllis Williams Lehmann and Karl Lehmann, 57–178. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1973.
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Observes that Mantegna’s imaging of the pagan gods depends on the illustrated late-14th-century mythological handbook known as the De deorum imaginibus libellus, but modified in the light of humanist and antiquarian research; his Muses and his Mercury respond to widely circulated drawings made in Greece by Cyriac of Ancona. Attempts to link Mantegna’s gods to imagery in Roman sarcophagus relief mainly serve to demonstrate Mantegna’s independence of ancient models.
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Nagel, Alexander. “25 Notes on Pseudoscripts in Italian Art.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011): 229–248.
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Includes a consideration of the enigmatic Greco-Latin inscription in Mantegna’s Pallas Expelling the Vices.
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Verheyen, Egon. The Paintings in the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este at Mantua. New York: New York University Press, 1971.
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Short monograph on the studiolo paintings, interpreted as moralizing allegories based on the opposition of Eros and Anteros, understood as Profane and Sacred Love. An effective critique of Verheyen’s use of sources is provided by Lightbown 1986 (cited under General Overviews).
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Wind, Edgar. “Mantegna’s Parnassus: A Reply to Some Recent Considerations.” Art Bulletin 31 (1949): 224–233.
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1949.11407875Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Wind’s forceful reply to the attack on his interpretation of Mantegna’s painting in his book Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (Cambridge, UK, and London: Harvard University Press, 1948), by Erika Tietze-Conrat, “Mantegna’s Parnassus. A Discussion of a Recent Interpretation.” Art Bulletin 31 (1949), 126–130. Wind pushes back against Tietze-Conrat’s factual and philological errors and preconceptions about decorum.
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Engravings
In early sources like Vasari and Lomazzo, Mantegna was credited with the execution of several engravings. Vasari listed six: the two Bacchanals, the Sea Gods, the Deposition, the Entombment, and the Risen Christ. Bartsch 1811 assigned twenty-three prints to Mantegna, a number curtailed to only seven “master prints” by Kristeller (see Kristeller 1901 and Kristeller 1902, both cited under General Overviews), followed by Hind 1911. Tietze-Conrat 1943 was skeptical that Mantegna would have acquired the highly specialized skills necessary to engrave his own plates. The 1993 exhibition greatly complicated the issue—Landau 1992 expanded Kristeller’s list of autograph engravings by four, while Boorsch 1992 de-attributed everything, re-ascribing them to a figure she called the Premier Engraver. Boorsch recognized no difference between the authorship of the seven master prints and the remaining sixteen on Bartsch’s original list; in her view these are all the work of a single master craftsman. Christiansen 1993 upheld Mantegna’s hands-on involvement in cutting the plates for the seven master prints and identified a large variation in quality and authorship in the group of twenty-three. Subsequent scholarship tended to align itself with Boorsch’s revisionist view, especially after the publication of documents recording Mantegna’s collaboration with the goldsmith/engraver Gian Marco Cavalli in 1475.
Bartsch, Adam Von. Le Peintre Graveur. Vol. 13, Les Vieux Maitres Italiens. Vienna: J.V. Degen, 1811;
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The foundational work on the history of print culture, in which Mantegna has a prominent role as one of the pioneering “painter-engravers” in Italy. Re-issued as The Illustrated Bartsch: Early Italian Masters, 25. Edited by Walter L. Zucker, Mark Strauss. New York: Abaris, 1982.
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Boorsch, Suzanne. “Mantegna and His Printmakers.” In Andrea Mantegna. Edited by Jane Martineau, 56–66. Milan: Electa, 1992.
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Argues that Mantegna did not engrave his own designs, assigning the Bartsch group of twenty-three to the anonymous Premier Engraver. A large group of engravings copied from the Premier Engraver’s oeuvre is assigned to Giovanni Andrea da Brescia, including prints with the monogram ZA previously assigned to Zoan Andrea, a Mantuan painter who seems to have engaged Simone da Reggio to engrave copies of Mantegna’s prints—which occasioned threats of violent retribution from Mantegna himself.
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Boorsch, Suzanne. “Mantegna and Engraving: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and a Few Hypotheses.” In Andrea Mantegna impronta del genio Convegno internazionale di studi : Padova, Verona, Mantova, 8, 9, 10 November 2006. 2 vols. Vol. 1. 415–437. Edited by Rodolfo Signorini, Viviana Rebonato, Sara Tammaccaro, Elga Disperdi, and Ines Mazzola, 507–520. Florence: Olschki, 2010.
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Develops the argument made in 1993, with additional documentary information (Canova 2001), with new arguments for identifying the oeuvre of Gian Marco Cavalli. A useful summary of the entire debate.
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Canova, Andrea. “Gian Marco Cavalli incisore per Andrea Mantegna e altre notizie sull’oreficieria e la tipografia a Mantova nel XV secolo.” Italia medioevale e umanistica 42 (2001): 149–179.
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First publication of a document dated 5 April 1475 of an agreement between Mantegna and the goldsmith Gian Marco Cavalli, where the latter agrees to engrave six designs by Mantegna at two ducats per month, and to refrain from showing designs or plates to anyone else on pain of a fine of one hundred ducats.
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Christiansen, Keith. “The Case for Mantegna as Printmaker.” The Burlington Magazine 135 (September 1993): 604–661.
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Argues, against Boorsch, that the seven prints achieve a near perfect simulation of Mantegna’s mode of drawing, and that such skilled rendering of line is distinct from the others in the larger group of twenty-three, and that they could only be by Mantegna himself.
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Emison, Patricia. “The Raucousness of Mantegna’s Mythological Engravings.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 124 (1994): 159–176.
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Considers that the vision of antiquity conveyed in the mythological prints emphasizes the facetious and subversive possibilities of myth, rather than moralizing gravity; they thus constitute a paradoxically elegant and erudite formulation of a “low style” that works on behalf of the artist as maker.
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Hind, Arthur M. Andrea Mantegna and the Italian pre-Raphaelite Engravers. London: W. Heinemann, 1911.
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Influential consideration of the engravings building on the conclusions of Kristeller 1901 and Kristeller 1902 (both cited under General Overviews).
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Jacobsen, Michael A. “The Meaning of Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Monsters.” Art Bulletin 64 (1982): 623–629.
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1982.10788023Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Proposes that the engraving is inspired by the accounts in Pliny the Elder, Diodorus Siculus, and others of the Telchines, monstrous and pugnacious demigods from Rhodes, skilled in metallurgy, image-making, and magical arts.
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Landau, David. “Mantegna as Printmaker.” In Andrea Mantegna. Edited by Jane Martineau, 44–54. Milan: Electa, 1992.
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Expands the corpus of seven prints that Kristeller and Hind had given to Mantegna.
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Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
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The chapter on Mantegna proposes that the prints were conceived to circulate a notion of absolute perfection in drawing, a kind of super-disegno: they are exemplars of a normative style which is also Mantegna’s autograph style.
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Tietze-Conrat, Erika. “Was Mantegna an Engraver?” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24 (1943): 375–381.
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A skeptical view taken up a half-century later by Boorsch 1992 (cited under Engravings).
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Late Works
Commissioned in 1505 for the studiolo of a wealthy Venetian, Francesco Cornaro, The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele to Rome was one of a pair depicting events from the ancient Roman ancestors of the Cornaro family, the gens Cornelia, which included Scipio Africanus and his cousin Scipio Nasica. The specific episode depicted has been much disputed; see Braham 1973, Blumenröder 2005, Pincelli 2010. Following the painter’s death, his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini supplied the other picture, depicting The Continence of Scipio Africanus—a well-known exemplum of justice, mercy, and princely restraint, and not uncommon in 15th-century painting. Scholars have believed that the commission consisted of four canvasses on the basis of a later letter to Isabella from Mantegna’s son Ludovico of 12 November 1507, but Agosti, “Su Mantegna: 5” 82–83, contends that “quatro” in that letter is a misreading of the word “quadro” (painting), and cannot stand as evidence that there were more than two pictures.
Blumenröder, Sabine. “Andrea Mantegna’s Grisaille Paintings: Colour Metamorphosis as a Metaphor for History.” In Symbols of Time in the History of Art. Edited by Christian Heck and Kristen Lippincott, 41–55. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brepols, 2005.
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Proposes that the emphasis on media and mediation in the late grisailles is to express the remoteness of human history as distinct from divine truth.
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Bolland, Andrea. “Artifice and Stability in Late Mantegna.” In Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 152–176. London: Wiley, 2015.
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Situates Mantegna’s late St. Sebastian with regard to late-15th- and early16th-century debates on the arts (the so-called paragone) and literary language (the questione della lingua). The hardness of Mantegna’s style is read as an affirmation of art’s fictionality, and as a polemical alternative to the soft shadows and naturalism of Leonardo da Vinci.
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Braham, Allan. “A Reappraisal of The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome by Mantegna.” The Burlington Magazine 115 (1973): 457–463.
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Identifies the androgynous figure who bows before the image of Cybele as Claudia Quinta, the chaste woman who escorted the sacred image into Rome; the focus on female chastity is motivated by the recent historical prominence of a Cornaro family member, Caterina, queen of Cyprus. The argument is questionable—the kneeling figure seems to be male and a priest of Cybele—but it has proved tenacious.
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Pincelli, Maria Agata. “La Roma Triumphans e la nascita dell’antiquaria: Biondo Flavio e Andrea Mantegna.” In Mantegna e Roma: L’artista davanti all’antico. Edited by Teresa Calvano, Claudia Cieri Via, and Leandro Ventura, 79–99. Rome: Bulzoni, 2010.
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Observes that all of the principal elements in Mantegna’s Cybele can be found in the adaptation of Livy’s and Ovid’s accounts of the episode in the first book of Flavio Biondo’s Roma Triumphans: the idol of the goddess with her crown of towers, the retinue and behavior of the eunuch priests, and the entry of Rome through the Porta Capena.
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Mantegna and Humanist Culture
Beyond the routine association of Mantegna with Leon Battista Alberti discussed, e,g., in Baxandall 1970; and Christiansen 1994, which while possible given Alberti’s architectural projects in Mantua has left no traces, Mantegna’s connection with the world of Latin and Greek scholarship in Padua and Mantua included a much wider circle of men of letters with diverse interests: the poet Janus Pannonius, the scribe and antiquarian Felice Feliciano, the physician and historian Michele Savonarola, the Carmelite “new Virgil” Battista Spagnoli, the poet-physician Battista Fiera, and the Ferrarese courtier poet Antonio Tebaldeo—see Dionisotti 1958 and Campbell 2020 (cited under General Overviews). Steinberg 2020 debunks the notion of Mantegna as an “Albertian” painter. In Naples around 1500 the humanist Gian Gioviano Pontano referred to his knowledge of ancient costume and Jacopo Sannazaro describes a beautiful painted vessel with Bacchic scenes by Mantegna in his Arcadia (composed around 1480 but published in 1504), discussed in Battisti 1965 and Battisti 2009.
Battisti, Eugenio. “Mantegna e la letteratura classica.” In Atti del VI Convegno internazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. 23–56. Florence: Sansoni, 1965.
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Study of the literary sources for the Triumphs and the Battle of the Sea Gods; demonstrates the noteworthy frequency with which Mantegna’s art engages with Greek literature—Homer, Lucian, Galen—and takes a description of a decoration with Bacchic themes by Battista Fiera as a record of a “Homeric” work by Mantegna.
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Battisti, Eugenio. “Mantegna as Humanist.” In Mantegna e Roma. L’artista davanti all’antico. Edited by Teresa Calvano, Claudia Cieri Via, Leandro Ventura, 657–674. Rome: Bulzoni, 2009.
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Mantegna’s “humanism” here means not only his associations with Neo-Latin poets, but an investment in natural philosophy, manifest in the artist’s preoccupation with geological formations. Text of a seminar from 1966.
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Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators. Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
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A book of groundbreaking importance for the study of humanist literary culture and its relationship to artistic practice in the early Renaissance. Makes the case that Mantegna’s approach to pictorial composition parallels the precepts of Alberti’s De pictura, where the idea of artistic composition—based on the Ciceronian periodic sentence—is first formulated.
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Christiansen, Keith. “Rapporti presunti, probabili e (forse anche) attuali fra Alberti e Mantegna.” In Leon Battista Alberti. Edited by Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel, 336–358. Milan: Electa, 1994.
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Makes a detailed case for Mantegna as the realization of Alberti’s pictorial and architectural aesthetic, although the parallels could as easily come from a world of shared interests in Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and other ancient sources.
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Dionisotti, Carlo. “Battista Fiera.” Italian Mediovale e umanistica I (1958): 401–418.
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Account of one of the humanists most frequently associated with Mantegna, including him as one of the interlocutors in his dialogue Momus.
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Greenstein, Jack Matthew. Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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An examination of the idea of historia in Alberti and its possible significance for Mantegna, sometimes highly speculative but with interesting discussions of the Uffizi Circumcision of Christ and the Vienna St. Sebastian.
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Steinberg, Leo. “Mantegna. Did he Paint by the Book?” In Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays. Edited by Sheila Schwartz, 34–70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
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Witty and polemical assessment of Mantegna’s relationship to the De Pictura of Leon Battista Alberti, arguing for the painter’s substantial independence from the humanist.
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Mantegna And Architecture
The question of Mantegna as architect is surveyed in Frommel 2010. Mantegna served in the 1480s as an architectural consultant on the portion of the Gonzaga palace known as the Domus Nova, on a tomb for the marchioness Barbara of Brandenburg, while also designing a house of his own with a round courtyard “in the form of an amphitheater” – analyzed by Rosenthal 1962 and Ferlisi 2006, as well as his own funerary chapel in Leon Battista Alberti’s new church of Sant’Andrea, on which see Pastore 2006.
Ferlisi, Gianfranco. “La Casa del Mantegna dove l’armonia si dipinge nella pietra.” In A casa di Andrea Mantegna. Cultura artistica a Mantova nel Quattrocento. Edited by Rodolfo Signorini, 154–177. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006.
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Well-illustrated and comprehensively documented study of the house built by Mantegna and relinquished by him to the marchese Francesco Gonzaga in 1502.
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Frommel, Christoph L. “Mantegna Architetto.” Andrea Mantegna impronta del genio Convegno internazionale di studi : Padova, Verona, Mantova, 8, 9, 10 November 2006. 2 vols. Vol. 1. 181–202. Edited by Rodolfo Signorini, Viviana Rebonato, Sara Tammaccaro, Elga Disperdi, and Ines Mazzola, 507–520. Florence: Olschki, 2010.
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Detailed account of Mantegna’s painted architecture from the Ovetari Chapel to the Triumphs, as well as of his house in Mantua, arguing for Mantegna’s knowledge of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria.
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Pastore, Giuse. “La cappella di Mantegna nella basilica di Sant’Andrea.” In Mantegna a Mantova 1460–1506. By Mauro Lucco, 334–345. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Recent account of the design and decoration of Mantegna’s funerary chapel, focusing on the building history and its afterlife.
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Rosenthal, E. E. “The House of Mantegna in Mantua.” Gazette-des-Beaux-Arts 60 (1962): 327–350.
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Should be consulted with Ferlisi 2006, but the most comprehensive account in English, drawing on findings from the restoration in 1940–1942.
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Script, Epigraphy, Arts of the Book
Mantegna experimented with various forms of his signature—the cartellino, the colophon, the formal Latin dedication, the epistolary signature—which position his enterprise between the roles of painter, scribe, author, and a correspondent seeking an addressee, as argued especially in Arasse 2015. The exhibitions since 1992 routinely include sections on book illumination, engaging questions first broached in Meiss 1957. Frequently absorbed by questions of attribution, there is often a focus on scribes and illuminators who responded to Mantegna’s pictorial style and who adapted his epigraphy in their calligraphic initials, as argued in Trevisani 2006. On arriving in Mantua, Mantegna aggressively promoted the career of Girolamo da Cremona, a miniaturist working in a style close to his own, against that of the older Belbello da Pavia.
Arasse, Daniel. “Signing Mantegna.” Translated by S. J. Campbell. In Mantegna: Making Art (History). Edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering, 54–74. London: Wiley, 2015.
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An examination of the artist’s inventive and multifarious signing practices.
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Meiss, Millard. Andrea Mantegna as Illuminator: An Episode in Renaissance Art, Humanism and Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.
DOI: 10.7312/meis90344Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Celebrated study of Mantegna’s possible role in manuscript illumination (still controversial) and his association with the development of an elegant form of lettering the author calls littera mantiniana; focuses on the commissions of Jacopo Marcello with illuminations now assigned to Jacopo or Giovanni Bellini.
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Pincus, Debra. “Calligraphy, Epigraphy, and the Paduan-Venetian Culture of Letters in the Early Renaissance.” In Padua and Venice: Transcultural Exchange in the Early Modern Age. Edited by Brigit Blass-Simmen and Stefan Weppelmann, 41–61. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110465402-005Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Essential context for understanding Mantegna’s inventive approach to the painting of written language throughout his career.
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Tosetti Grandi, Paola. “Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Marcanova e Felice Feliciano.” In Andrea Mantegna, l’impronta del genio Convegno internazionale di studi : Padova, Verona, Mantova, 8, 9, 10 November 2006. 2 vols. Vol. 1. 273–361. Edited by Rodolfo Signorini, Viviana Rebonato, Sara Tammaccaro, Elga Disperdi, and Ines Mazzola, 507–520. Florence: Olschki, 2010.
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Detailed treatment of Mantegna’s relation to antiquarian and scribal circles which converged in the figures of Marcanova and Feliciano, who produced sylloge (compilations) of ancient epigraphy.
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Trevisani, Filippo, ed. Andrea Mantegna e I Gonzaga: Rinascimento nel Castello di San Giorgio. Milan: Electa, 2006.
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Catalogue includes a comprehensive treatment of book illumination in Mantua, with several essays on Mantuan and Paduan miniaturists in Mantegna’s circle: Bartolomeo di San Vito, Gaspare da Padova, Girolamo da Cremona.
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Other Studies
Included here are a miscellany of thematic studies of motifs in Mantegna’s art—Jones 1987, Campbell 2015, Faietti 2010—as well as questions of Mantegna’s peninsular reception in Toscano 2008, and the artist’s Paduan social world in Strehlke 2012.
Campbell, Stephen J. “Cloud-poiesis: Perception, Allegory, Seeing the Other.” In Senses of Sight: Towards a Multisensorial Approach of the Image. Essays in Honor of Victor I. Stoichita. Edited by Henri de Reidmatten, Nicolas Galley, etc., 7–37. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2015.
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On the theme of the “figure in the clouds” in the painting of Mantegna and Luca Signorelli.
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Faietti, Marzia. “The Gorgóneion from Mantua.” Artibus et Historiae 61 (2010): 27–42.
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Examines the theme of the grotesque and terrifying mask in Mantegna’s art, which sometimes seems to bear the artist’s own features, as a conceit regarding the “petrifying” gorgon-like character of his talent.
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Jones, Roger. “Mantegna and Materials.” I Tatti Studies 2 (1987): 71–90.
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A study of the largely invented colored marbles in Mantegna’s paintings.
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Strehlke, Carl. “Nofri di Palla Strozzi: Amateur Painter and Friend of Mantegna.” In Gifts in Return: Essays in Honour of Charles Dempsey. Edited by Melinda W. Schlitt, 115–129. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012.
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Account of the member of the famous Florentine family exiled to Padua in 1434, active in the commission to Donatello but also recorded as a scribe and painter.
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Toscano, Gennaro. “A lui cominciò ad rinovarsi la antiquità: per la fortuna di Andrea Mantegna a Napoli.” In Napoli e tutto il mondo. Edited by Livio Pestilli, Sebastian Schütze, Ingrid Rowland, 79–99. Rome and Pisa, Italy: Fabrizio Serra, 2008.
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A study of the reception and influence of Mantegna in Southern Italy.
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Article
- Academies
- Aemilia Lanyer
- Agrippa d’Aubigné
- Alberti, Leon Battista
- Alexander VI, Pope
- Amsterdam
- Andrea Mantegna
- Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt
- Anne Boleyn
- Anne Bradstreet
- Antwerp
- Aretino, Pietro
- Ariosto, Ludovico
- Art and Science
- Art, German
- Art in Renaissance Florence
- Art in Renaissance Siena
- Art in Renaissance Venice
- Art Literature and Theory of Art
- Art Market
- Art of Poetry
- Art, Spanish
- Art, 16th- and 17th-Century Flemish
- Art, 17th-Century Dutch
- Artemisia Gentileschi
- Artisans
- Ascham, Roger
- Askew, Anne
- Astell, Mary
- Astrology, Alchemy, Magic
- Augsburg
- Austria
- Avignon Papacy
- Bacon, Francis
- Banking and Money
- Barbaro, Ermolao, the Younger
- Barbaro, Francesco
- Baron, Hans
- Baroque
- Baroque Art and Architecture in Italy
- Barzizza, Gasparino
- Bathsua Makin
- Beaufort, Margaret
- Bellarmine, Cardinal
- Bembo, Pietro
- Benito Arias Montano
- Bernardino of Siena, San
- Beroaldo, Filippo, the Elder
- Bessarion, Cardinal
- Bible, The
- Biondo, Flavio
- Bishops, 1550–1700
- Bishops, 1400-1550
- Black Death and Plague: The Disease and Medical Thought
- Boccaccio, Giovanni
- Bohemia and Bohemian Crown Lands
- Borgia, Cesare
- Borgia, Lucrezia
- Borromeo, Cardinal Carlo
- Bosch, Hieronymous
- Bracciolini, Poggio
- Brahe, Tycho
- Bruegel, Pieter the Elder
- Bruni, Leonardo
- Bruno, Giordano
- Bucer, Martin
- Buonarroti, Michelangelo
- Burgundy and the Netherlands
- Calvin, John
- Calvinism
- Camões, Luís de
- Caravaggio
- Cardano, Girolamo
- Cardinal Richelieu
- Cardinals
- Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa De
- Cary, Elizabeth
- Casas, Bartolome de las
- Castiglione, Baldassarre
- Catherine of Siena
- Catholic/Counter-Reformation
- Catholicism, Early Modern
- Cecilia del Nacimiento
- Cellini, Benvenuto
- Cervantes, Miguel de
- Charles V, Emperor
- China and Europe, 1550-1800
- Christian-Muslim Exchange
- Church Fathers in Renaissance and Reformation Thought, The
- Ciceronianism
- Cities and Urban Patriciates
- Civic Humanism
- Civic Ritual
- Classical Tradition, The
- Clifford, Anne
- Colet, John
- Colonna, Vittoria
- Columbus, Christopher
- Comenius, Jan Amos
- Commedia dell'arte
- Concepts of the Renaissance, c. 1780–c. 1920
- Confraternities
- Constantinople, Fall of
- Contarini, Gasparo, Cardinal
- Convent Culture
- Conversion
- Conversos and Crypto-Judaism
- Copernicus, Nicolaus
- Cornaro, Caterina
- Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici
- Costume
- Council of Trent
- Crime and Punishment
- Croatia
- Cromwell, Oliver
- Cruz, Juana de la, Mother
- Cruz, Juana Inés de la, Sor
- Dance
- d'Aragona, Tullia
- Datini, Margherita
- Davies, Eleanor
- de Commynes, Philippe
- de Sales, Saint Francis
- de Valdés, Juan
- Death and Dying
- Decembrio, Pier Candido
- Dentière, Marie
- Des Roches, Madeleine and Catherine
- d’Este, Isabella
- di Toledo, Eleonora
- Dialogue
- Diplomacy
- Dolce, Ludovico
- Donatello
- Donne, John
- Drama, English Renaissance
- Dürer, Albrecht
- du Bellay, Joachim
- Du Guillet, Pernette
- Dutch Overseas Empire
- Ebreo, Leone
- Edmund Campion
- Edward IV, King of England
- El Greco
- Elizabeth I, the Great, Queen of England
- Emperor, Maximilian I
- England, 1485-1642
- English Overseas Empire
- English Puritans, Quakers, Dissenters, and Recusants
- Environment and the Natural World
- Epic and Romance
- Erasmus
- Europe and the Globe, 1350–1700
- European Tapestries
- Family and Childhood
- Fedele, Cassandra
- Federico Barocci
- Ferrara and the Este
- Ficino, Marsilio
- Filelfo, Francesco
- Florence
- Fonte, Moderata
- Foscari, Francesco
- France in the 17th Century
- France in the 16th Century
- Francis Xavier, St
- Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros
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