when the Laocoön was rediscovered near Rome. This ancient Greek sculpture, representing a high priest of Troy and his sons being strangled by a serpent sent by a punishing god, was universally admired when it was dug out of the ground in 1506. It was brought to the city in a grand parade as flowers were strewn in its path and church bells tolled, despite the pagan subject matter and the nudity of the figures. The Italian people had come to worship all things classical, and Mantegna – with his vividly painted representations of the ancient world – was an active player in the rebirth of Greek and Roman culture which has come to be called the Renaissance.
6. Francesco Squarcione, San Lazara Altarpiece, 1449–1452. Tempera on panel. Musei Civici, Padua.
7. Martyrdom of St Christopher, c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
An important development in intellectual culture of the early fifteenth century was the remarkable rise in humanistic learning. Today there are several meanings and connotations for the word “humanist.” In the context of Renaissance history, a humanist is one whose chief field of study was literature, especially that of classical Greece and Rome. Some ancient literature was known throughout the Middle Ages, but it was studied largely for its value as way of improving one’s grammar, logic, and vocabulary, though its underlying paganism caused it to be held in suspicion. In the fourteenth- and, increasingly, the fifteenth century classical writings were avidly being sought by scholars and wealthy patrons. The Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1454) scoured the libraries in medieval monasteries in Switzerland and rediscovered manuscripts of works by Cicero and Tertullian; valuable texts which had been left rotting in piles of parchment, neglected and unknown for centuries. The scholar Niccolò Niccoli (d. 1437) rediscovered several classical texts, and he formed his own small collection of Roman statuary and cameos. By the time of Mantegna’s birth, the revival of classical literature and ideals was in full swing, the interest in antiquity fuelled by a tenacious and passionate group of humanists. The interest in classical culture spread quickly to a larger public in fifteenth-century Italy, well beyond the narrow ranks of humanist scholars. A whole new secular world opened that had hitherto been largely ignored, and people of all ages and social backgrounds came to embrace this great rediscovery. As a painter, Mantegna would cater to the demands of a public thirsting for art, both sacred and secular, which imitated the distant but laudable civilisations of classical antiquity.
The northern Italian city of Padua (Fig. 5), where Mantegna would begin his artistic career, had been the ancient Roman city of Patavium and in the fifteenth century as today still contained some classical ruins. In addition to these physical remains of Roman civilisation, it was a city redolent with the spirit of antiquity because of the intellectual interests there in ancient literature. Padua was one of the main centres in Renaissance Italy of humanist scholarship; its university was the chief institution of higher learning in the Venetian Republic (to which Padua was subjected in 1405 and thereafter), and a number of professors were leaders of their fields in the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature.
8. St James Baptising Hermogenes (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
Many of the humanists in Padua were passionate recorders of ancient inscriptions, and throughout his life Mantegna maintained a strong interest in classical Roman lettering. Some humanists became admirers and counsellors of Mantegna, including the artist’s friend Ulisse degli Aleotti and the scholar Giovanni Marcanova, the latter a professor at the University of Padua. Mantegna maintained friendly relations throughout his life with learned advisers, and his early conversion to the spirit of classical revivalism was owed in large part to the humanistic atmosphere in Padua, where patrons as well as local scholars shared a taste for Greek and Roman culture.
The world of humanist scholars and classically minded patrons was an elite realm. Mantegna’s parents, who were of humble stock and living in a provincial village, certainly knew little of this exciting literary revival or of the new Renaissance artistic style. Mantegna’s father was a country carpenter from Isola di Cartura, a small town a few miles outside of Padua. Andrea spent some of his early years herding cattle near the family’s village, yet he must have shown some early interest or talent in drawing, for by 1442, probably at about the age of ten or eleven (the standard age at the time to begin an apprenticeship), Andrea’s father took him to the thriving city of Padua to a certain master painter named Francesco Squarcione (c. 1394–1468) and asked he give the boy room and board and teach him to be a professional painter.
Francesco Squarcione is not exactly a household name today, but he was an important figure in Italian painting of the period. The records of his professional activity as an artist and teacher constitute some of the most colourful episodes of Renaissance art history. Squarcione started his career as a tailor and embroiderer, and only turned to painting later on in life. The extent of his own artistic output is in dispute, but it is generally agreed that at least two of his paintings have survived, a small altarpiece (Fig. 6) and a panel painting of the Madonna and Child. These works, although carried out with a lively sense of design and an attention to detail, demonstrate he was a competent but not extraordinary painter.
Yet his workshop, which he kept filled with apprentices and pupils over the years, was a novel institution. Although guild regulations classified his school as a workshop, Squarcione called it a studium, or what we might call an art studio. It was arguably the first professional art school in Italy and in Europe. Beginning in 1431 and continuing until his death in 1468, Squarcione trained over 130 young artists in his school, among them Andrea Mantegna.
9. Masolino, Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabatha, 1426–1427. Fresco, 255 × 588 cm (full fresco). Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.
Boys came not just to help turn out works in the master’s style but to learn more broadly about the art of painting and design by studying plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statues and by copying some of the hundreds of drawings of works of art Squarcione had collected during his wide travels. Squarcione is said to have been to Greece (a rare experience for an artist of this period), making drawings of remarkable works of art, which he used in his courses of instruction. He would sometimes take boys in solely to teach them one aspect of painting, such as perspective. Thus, Squarcione introduced a novel idea into the art world: pupils could be more than mere apprentices. He treated them as students in a broader sense and taught them a variety of skills necessary to become independent masters.
Since a master painter could avoid paying some guild fees by collaborating with family members, Squarcione legally adopted several of his students as his own sons. Andrea Mantegna was one of these adoptees, and he called himself “Andrea Squarcione” as late as 1466, when he was a mature and accomplished artist. Mantegna lived with Squarcione as a pupil and collaborator from about 1441 until 1448, and Squarcione was undoubtedly an important influence on the boy’s artistic formation. Indeed, Squarcione bragged in a legal document he had “made Mantegna what he was”.
Despite the close relations and the legal adoption, Mantegna had to sue Squarcione to receive a greater payment for his collaboration with him. Indeed, many others working under Squarcione felt he was benefiting unduly from their work as pupils. They helped him complete commissions and he gave them room, board, instruction, and some payment, but sometimes they felt their remuneration was insufficient. One pupil sued Squarcione for not being capable of teaching what he promised. Still, it is clear Squarcione’s proto-academy for the arts was a new type of institution, and there were bound to be disputes about the conditions of one’s course of study and the contracts under which one gave assistance to the master-teacher. For his part, Mantegna perhaps settled his dispute with Squarcione amicably, for the two were in occasional professional relations with each other until Mantegna left Padua permanently in the
