it was the master’s training and open attitude to the study of various styles that was progressive. The Ovetari Chapel was a showpiece of artistic revolution, and Mantegna, thanks partly due to the early death of Pizzolo, was responsible for the greatest part of the work.
The Ovetari Chapel was almost completely destroyed during an aerial raid in 1944 when a cluster of bombs meant for the nearby railroad yards fell wide of the mark. Fortunately, colour illustrations of the works were taken shortly before the destruction. Some of the works were removed from the wall for restoration before the raid, notably Mantegna’s Assumption of the Virgin (Fig. 19) and his Martyrdom of Saint Christopher (Fig. 7); these survive and have been reinstalled in the chapel, giving us an idea of Mantegna’s great achievement.
Some of the more extraordinary works of art of the fifteenth century resulted from the application of Renaissance ideals of lively and detailed narrative to the illustration of fantastic medieval accounts of saints. Most of Mantegna’s scenes in the Ovetari Chapel were drawn from the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, a thirteenth-century Dominican priest from northern Italy. His colourful stories of the lives of saints are often lacking in historical authenticity or Biblical authority, but for centuries they moved and inspired the faithful to worship Christian martyrs and heroes. In Mantegna’s time, despite new secular trends in culture, the religious fervour of the Middle Ages had not passed. Men and women still saw visions, went on long pilgrimages, believed in miracles, and feared the intervention of the devil in human affairs. The frescoes of the Ovetari Chapel were painted for people who still passionately believed in the power of God and even in the veracity of the most far-fetched Christian legends. On the left wall of the Ovetari Chapel Mantegna represented scenes from the life of Saint James the Greater. Niccolò Pizzolo was originally to have painted part of the left wall, but his slowness and his early death meant Mantegna ended up painting this wall, working off and on between 1449 and 1455 (Fig. 16).
15. Niccolò Pizzolo, Self-Portrait (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
Already at this early stage in his life Mantegna proved he was one of the great illustrators of the Renaissance, for he could take a simple text and present a clear and faithful narrative while also painting in his own unique style, based on a dry realism and a thoughtful attempt to re-create the style, costumes, and architecture of antiquity. Mantegna began painting at the top of the wall with a scene from the Bible (Matthew 3:21 and Mark 1:19), representing Christ calling the fishermen James and John to join him in his cause (Fig. 18). That these are specimens of the new style in painting would have been instantly obvious to contemporaries; instead of the sweet, decorative, soft style of Gothic painting, here we see a simple composition, and a sweeping landscape of heroic grandeur. Mantegna’s stocky, tough figures have the substance and blunt realism reminiscent of Roman sculpture.
The rest of Mantegna’s scenes follow the narrative of James’ life as told by Jacobus de Voragine, whose Golden Legend included some especially dramatic, if improbable, details of the life of James. The legendary account is lively enough, but young Mantegna fleshed out the details of the story even further in his mural, adding his own particular narrative clarity and classical features. In one panel, Saint James is shown preaching to a crowd in the Holy Land. However, a certain magician named Hermogenes, intent on rooting out Christianity, had demons come and try to cast a spell on the saint. Here is Mantegna’s vivid realism and dramatic narrative; the crowd includes a variety of emotional attitudes, from frightened contemplation to outright terror, and the scene is presented by Mantegna with economy and force. Even his bits of classical sculpture add to the drama, as a carved dolphin leaps above the lintel to the door on the right, and a very realistic stone head in a roundel seems to cry out in fright. To further enliven the work, Mantegna shows various chubby little boys (called putti in Italian), climbing about on swags of fruit, and one of them is even falling off! This kind of busy, witty detail would remain characteristic of his artistic style. Certainly, nothing in the legendary account by Voragine helped the young artist to invent such a striking and eye-catching motif.
In the next scene, James forced the demons to bring Hermogenes before him, and in this scene James is shown baptising the magician, the water splashing off of his bald head (Fig. 8). This section marks a breakthrough for Mantegna in its representation of space, for it is the first time he employed the rigorous, single-point perspective system that was a hallmark of Early Renaissance painting in Florence. Increasingly, fifteenth-century viewers wanted the precision of a carefully constructed perspective system offering the convincing illusion that a window to another world has been opened up beyond the picture frame. In single-point perspective, a grid of orthogonal and transversal lines marks the apparent diminution of space, with the orthogonals leading back to a single vanishing point.
16. The Excecution of St James, c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
17. Masaccio, The Tribute Money, c. 1428. Fresco, 255 × 598 cm. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Camine, Florence.
Perspective, an important aspect of Renaissance visual culture, was a way to organise the chaos of visual experience, using an orderly, mathematical system. Artistic perspective is an objective and scientific method of spatial organisation, but it is also intensely subjective, showing the world as if seen by an individual spectator who occupies a particular position in the world. Medieval artists, with their otherworldly vision, were not interested in such a rigorous organisation of picture space. The system did contain two appealing aspects for Italians of the fifteenth century, for it is timelessly mathematical on the one hand and very personal on the other. It became the standard system of spatial organisation in Italian painting, although, as with other innovations, its adoption happened over the course of two generations, occurring one city and one artist at a time.
In his Saint James Baptising Hermogenes, all the lines in the pavement, on the entablature at the left, the lines of the roof and so forth converge on a single point on the right, giving the little city square in Jerusalem where the action takes place plausible depth on the chapel wall. This system was not used in the Preaching of Saint James, where one can sense even without measuring it that the space was cramped and inaccurately drawn. Clearly, during the time between the making of these works, Mantegna had learned about the new perspective system. Squarcione did not seem to comprehend single-point perspective until later in his life, so Mantegna must have learned the system elsewhere. Perhaps Mantegna had seen the book On Painting by the theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1435), in which the author set out in simple terms the rules for making paintings in perspective (Fig. 8). Or maybe Mantegna received a perspective drawing or instructions from the Florentine sculptor Donatello, who was making reliefs for the nearby church in Padua at this time using convincing spatial recession in elaborate settings.
18. The Calling of James and John (destroyed), c. 1448–1457. Fresco. Ovetari Chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua.
In addition to using single-point perspective and filling his works with reminiscences of antiquity, Mantegna linked his art to classical thought and humanism through its very simplicity and economy. A widespread belief in antiquity, revived by fifteenth-century theorists like Leon Battista Alberti, was that art should be direct, simple, and without unnecessary elements and affectation; some pictorial variety is good, but overabundance is distracting and unworthy of the best artistic minds. A good painting, like a good person, it was thought, is without excess and without superfluous finery. In this spirit, Mantegna’s story-telling is economical and vivid. Thus, the young artist managed to convey the moral quality of classical culture as well as including in his murals specific details borrowed from Greco-Roman art. Included throughout these murals is Mantegna’s adaptation of Roman drapery style. Avoiding the gentle, curvilinearity of late Gothic painting, Mantegna depicts garments that are folded,
