He remained in Mantua and became the artist for one of the most prestigious courts in Italy – the Court of Gonzaga. Classical art was born.
Despite his links with Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna refused to adopt their innovative use of colour or leave behind his own technique of engraving.
135. Andrea Mantegna, St Sebastian, c. 1475–1485. Tempera on canvas, 275 × 142 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (France).
136. Ercole de’ Roberti, The Month of September: The Love between Mars and Venus (detail), c. 1470. Fresco. Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (Italy). The pyramidal composition and the attention paid to the quality of the drawing are characteristic of the Florentine researches at the time.
137. Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Martyrdom of St Sebastian, 1475. Oil on poplar, 291.5 × 202.6 cm. The National Gallery, London (United Kingdom).
138. Hans Memling, Vanity (central panel of the Triptych of Terrestrial Vanity and Celestial Redemption), c. 1490. Oil on wood, 20 × 13 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg (France).
Hans MEMLING
(Seligenstadt, 1433 – Bruges, 1494)
Little is known of Memling’s life. It is surmised that he was a German by descent but the definite fact of his life is that he painted at Bruges, sharing with the Van Eycks, who had also worked in that city, the honour of being the leading artists of the so-called ‘School of Bruges’. He carried on their method of painting, and added to it a quality of gentle sentiment. In his case, as in theirs, Flemish art, founded upon local conditions and embodying purely local ideals, reached its fullest expression.
139. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), Primavera, c. 1478. Tempera on panel, 203 × 314 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Italy).
The painting, sometimes called Primavera, but now and again also Realm of Venus, is Botticelli’s most celebrated masterpiece. This work is one in a series of paintings depicting heathen myths and legends in the form of antique gods and heroes. Just as convincingly and naively, and with the same enthusiasm, Botticelli makes the beauty of the naked human body his task. In the large presentation of Primavera he does indeed describe an antique subject, stipulated by his clients and advisers, but he penetrates it with his mind, his imagination and his artistic sense. The composition is built up in nine, almost life-size figures in the foreground of an orange grove. The individual figures are borrowed from Poliziano’s poem about the great tournament in the spring of 1475, the Giostra, in which Giuliano was declared the winner. The artistic appearance of Primavera which, apart from the dull old layer of varnish, is well preserved, deviates from most of Botticelli’s paintings in so far as that the local colours are rather secondary. This is how the artist tried to bring out the full beauty of the figures’ bodies, which, apart from Venus and Primavera, are more or less naked. He enhances this with the deep green background, covered with flowers and fruit. There, where local colours occur to a greater extent as, for example, in the short red robe of Mercury, the pale blue decoration of the god of wind or the blue dress and red cloak of Venus in the middle, the colours have been strongly tinted with gold ornaments and glaze.
Sandro BOTTICELLI (Alessandro di MARIANO FILIPEPI)
(Florence, 1445–1510)
He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari’s words, “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair – he has left a portrait of himself on the right-hand side of his picture of the Adoration of the Magi – would also become a painter, and to that end was placed with the Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi. But he was a realist, as the artists of his day had become, satisfied with the joy and skill of painting, and with the study of the beauty and character of the human subject instead of religious themes. Botticelli made rapid progress, loved his master, and later on extended his love to his master’s son, Filippino Lippi, and taught him to paint, but the master’s realism scarcely touched Lippi, for Botticelli was a dreamer and a poet.
Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative.
It has been said that Botticelli, “though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance.” As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna’s head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli’s pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to ‘line’ not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself.
This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master-draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.
140. Anonymous, Universal Chronology, The Creation of Eve, The Original Sin, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, Bruges, c. 1480. National Library of Russia, St Petersburg (Russia).
141. Ambrogio and Cristoforo de Predis, Fountain of Love, c. 1490. Biblioteca Estense, Modena (Italy).
142. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), The Birth of Venus, 1484–1486. Tempera on canvas, 180 × 280 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Italy).
The title announces the influence here of the Roman classics, as it selects the Roman name, rather than the Greek name for the goddess of love – Aphrodite. The geometric centre of the work is the gesture of modesty near the left hand of Venus, the central figure, although the triangular arrangement of the overall work leads our eye to accept her upper torso as central. Her long tresses and flowing garments throughout make the overall geometric arrangement soft and dynamic. The sides of an equilateral triangle are formed by the bodies of the figures on either side of Venus; the base of the triangle extends beyond the sides of the work, making the painting seem larger than it is (Piet Mondrian will exploit that technique in a minimalist way centuries later). The mature
