Andrea Mantegna self-portrait. Famous works of Andrea Mantegna. G. Holbein the Younger. "Dead Christ"

Postage stamp dedicated to Mantegna,
portrait from a bust at the entrance to the chapel of the church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua.
Andrea Mantegna at the age of fifty.

Andrea Mantegna (Italian Andrea Mantegna, c. 1431, Isola di Carturo, Veneto - September 13, 1506, Mantua) - Italian artist, representative of the Padua school of painting. Unlike most other classics of the Italian Renaissance, he wrote in a harsh and harsh manner.
Mantegna was born around 1431 in the Italian town of Isola di Cartura near Venice, in the family of a lumberjack. In 1441 he was adopted by the artist Francesco Squarcione. He studied fine arts, as well as Latin at Squarcione, in 1445 he was enrolled in the painters' workshop of Padua.
At the age of 17, Mantegna achieved independence from Squarcione in court and has since worked as an independent artist. In his youth, he was influenced by the Florentine school, in particular by Donatello.
In 1453, Mantegna married the daughter of Jacopo Bellini Nicolosia (Nicolosa). In 1460 he became court painter to the Dukes of Gonzaga.
The painter Andrea Mantegna was also an innovator in engraving, and his prints on antique themes later influenced Dürer in particular. The graphic works of Mantegna (the cycle of engravings on copper “The Battle of the Sea Gods”, circa 1470), which are almost as good as his paintings in terms of chased monumentality of images, combine sculptural plasticity with the tenderness of line modeling. Andrea Mantegna combined the main artistic aspirations of the Renaissance masters of the 15th century: a passion for antiquity, an interest in accurate and thorough, down to the smallest detail, transmission of natural phenomena and selfless faith in linear perspective as a means of creating an illusion of space on a plane. His work became the main link between the early Renaissance in Florence and the later flowering of art in Northern Italy.

Samson and Delilah Tempera on canvas. 1500. 36.8 x 47 cm.
National Gallery (London, UK)

Adoration of the shepherds. 1453: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Self portrait (far right) with wife (far left)
on the canvas "Bringing to the Temple", 1465-1466, "Berlin Art Gallery"

Parnassus, 1497 Louvre Museum, Paris

Triumph of Virtue.1499-1502. Louvre Museum, Paris

Prayer for the Cup, 1455 National Gallery, London

ALTAR IN THE CHURCH OF SAN ZENO, VERONA

Altar.1460: San Zeno, Verona

"Dead Christ", circa 1500, Brera Pinacoteca, Milan

Madonna and Child with a Choir of Cherubim (1485).

Marcus, evangelist. 1450. Art Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Portrait of Cardinal Lodovico Trevisano Wood, tempera c1459-c1469
33 x 44 cm. Jam ldegalerie, State Museums (Berlin, Germany)

Death of the Virgin. Wood, tempera. 1460. 42 x 54 cm. Prado Museum (Madrid, Spain)

Adoration of the Magi.65 x 48 cm 1495-1505. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, California, USA)

Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian 1480. Louvre

Madonna and Sleeping Child Tempera on canvas. 1465-1470
32 x 43 cm Jam ldegalerie, State Museums (Berlin, Germany)

Ludovico Gonzago family

Crucifixion, 1456-59, from the predella from the San Zeno Altarpiece, now in the Louvre, Paris

"Adoration of the Magi", Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Judith and Holofernes, 1495-1500,
National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin

David with the head of Goliath. 1490-1495
Kunsthistorisches Museum - Vienna (Austria)

San Luca altarpiece, 1453, tempera on panel, Brera, Milan

Madonna and Child with Magdalene and John the Baptist

Noli me tangere

Saint George. Wood, tempera. 1460. 32 x 66 cm. Accademia Gallery (Venice, Italy)

Christ the Savior. 1493. Private collection

Ascension - circa 1461 Uffizi Gallery (Italy)

Madonna and Child Andrea Mantegna - circa 1489-1490 Uffizi Gallery (Italy)

Madonna with saints 1497

St. Jerome in the desert. 1448-1451 Museum de Arte di Sao Paulo (Brazil)

Epiphany. 1506. Oil on canvas. 228 x 175 cm Church of San Andres de Mantova. Mantova. Italy.

Fresco in the Camera degli Sposi, Doge's Palace, Mantua, Italy. 1474

Frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi, Doge's Palace, Mantua, Italy. 1474 "View of the western and northern walls"

Ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi, Castle of San Giorgio in Mantua, Italy

"Drinking Woman"

"Maiden with a sieve"

Saint James goes to martyrdom, Ovetari chapel

Self-portrait in the Ovetari Chapel

One of the outstanding artists of the early Renaissance. In 1441 he went to Padua, where he studied with Francesco Squarcione, who introduced him to ancient art. His work was largely influenced by the sculptures of Donatello (1386–1466), Andrea del Castagni and Jacopo Bellini. Since 1448, Mantegna has been working independently and soon becomes a recognized master. In 1460 he was court painter of the Gonzaga dynasty in Mantua. The works of Mantegna are characterized by an anatomically accurate depiction of the human body, careful reproduction of details, as well as a skillful transfer of perspective. These innovations had a strong influence on his brothers-in-law - Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. His copper engravings also became widely known north of the Alps.

Judith

Mantegna one of the first in the Renaissance portrayed Judith. His Judith is unemotional, her gaze is turned to eternity, this image is close to the images of saints.

Judith and Holofernes

Mantegna was the first to move from Christian to antique themes and was the first to study the anatomy of the naked body. He was the first to study the nature of movement, the mechanism of muscle contraction. He enriched the composition of paintings with new laws. He never has faces drawn only as portraits, the number of which could be arbitrarily increased. All figures participate in the action, all are subordinate to a firmly cohesive whole. A new beauty of the composition was revealed, which does not tolerate the former, so beloved careless stringing of details.

Mantegna and painting

Mantegna is considered the founder of the technique of painting on canvas. The earliest painted canvas in Italy is Saint Euphemia by Mantegna, created in 1454. Vasari wrote that, during the period of writing the cycle of paintings "The Triumph of Caesar" for the palace theater in Mantua in 1482-1492, Andrea Mantegna already had extensive experience working on canvas.

An artist who escaped any classification, standing outside schools and trends, Mantegna had an undeniable impact on the painting of Italy - from Padua to Venice. Thanks to the widespread circulation of Mantegna's engravings, the Italian Renaissance infiltrated Germany.

Crucifixion (circa 1458)

Wood, tempera, 41.3*29.5 cm. Uffizi, Florence.

This portrait is one of the best works of Mantegna. A slender composition helps to capture the strict appearance of the character. Mantegna uses the three-quarter rotation of the model, borrowed from the masters of northern European painting. In general, the portrait is an identical image of Carlo de' Medici.

Madonna della Vittoria (1496)

Tempera on canvas, 280*165 cm. Louvre, Paris.

Mantegna writes this work by order of Margrave Francesco II Gonzaga (1466–1519) - he is depicted in the foreground on the left - in memory of the battle of Fornovo di Taro in 1495. The famous altar painting is characterized by the use of optical illusion, the pergola effect, the heroic style of depicting characters, warm colour.

Dome fresco of the Camera degli Sposi (1465–1475)

Fragment of painting. Fresco, diameter: 270 cm. Castello San Giorgio, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.

On a fresco located on the vault of a small square room, Mantegna for the first time in Western European art created the illusion of space stretching into the sky. The hole is surrounded by a parapet around which are depicted angels looking down, people and animals. This is a bold composition, where the figures are depicted in an unusual perspective. The fresco was a model for later generations of artists, especially in the Baroque style.

Ludovico Gonzaga, his family and court (1474)

Fragment of painting. Fresco, 600*807 cm. Castello San Giorgio, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.

The frescoes from the Camera degli Sposi, the bedroom of Ludovico III Gonzaga (1414–1478), are a famous example of the world painting of the Italian Renaissance. In expressive scenes with a pronounced perspective and display of natural motifs, Mantegna represents the margrave's large, full of splendor surroundings - the family and closest subjects.

Parnassus (1497)

Tempera on canvas, 60*192 cm. Louvre, Paris.

The image of Mount Muses is the first painting in a cycle commissioned by the Mantua Countess Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) for her office. In the center of the picture are nine goddesses of the arts dancing to the music of Apollo, above him is Vulcan laughing at Cupid. Right next to each other - Mercury and Pegasus. The image of Mars and Venus looks unconventional for such works. The hill on which they stand is through and opens a view into the distance. On the right is a building that looks like a fortress. The landscape is depicted carefully and with fantasy.

Triumph of virtue over vice (1502)

Tempera on canvas, 160*192 cm. Louvre, Paris.

The painting, reflecting the plot of a moral and instructive allegory, also refers to the decoration of Isabella d'Este's office. It depicts a scene in which Minerva, the goddess of war and prudence, armed with a shield, spear and helmet, drives out vice from the garden of virtue. Along with Parnassus, this painting had a huge impact on the development of secular painting in the 16th century. The garden is surrounded by an arched stone fence decorated with flowers. You can see the surrounding landscape through it. Other deities watch from a cloud the dramatic action in the garden of virtue.

Notable works by Andrea Mantegna updated: September 16, 2017 by: Gleb

The doctor knows why he works: he fights diseases. The judge knows why he judges: so that there is justice in society. And the artist must know why he draws.

The artist turns beauty into beauty, that is, endows external harmony with consciousness. Mandelstam expressed his intention to turn even unkind heaviness into beauty (“out of unkind gravity, I will create something beautiful someday”), but, in essence, everything that is recognized in society as beauty is initially an ugly material - stone is rough, metal is cruel, paint stains ; it depends on the efforts of the creator to translate the properties of unkind material into the category of the beautiful, that is, to spiritualize.

Beauty does not know that she is beautiful - the artist teaches her this knowledge. Plato explained how the human consciousness works: we recall the knowledge given to us initially: we have knowledge unknown to ourselves because our consciousness belongs to a single eidos. Plato understood the word eidos as something like a “project” of humanity - it is a kind of “data bank”, a collector: eidos is an internal form of the world, it is a conglomerate of transcendent entities.

The process of remembering knowledge, according to Plato, is as follows: our consciousness is like a cave, and knowledge and ideas appear on the walls of this cave, like shadows. We react to the shadows flickering on the walls of the cave, we describe these shadows, we betray their meaning and, through the metaphors associated with these shadows, we regain our original knowledge. Plato says that the shadows that appear on the walls of the cave are cast by processions passing by the entrance to the cave. What kind of processions they are and what kind of shadows they cast, Plato (the story is told on behalf of Socrates in the dialogue “State”, but Plato came up with this metaphor) does not specify.

He writes that cymbals and timpani of the procession are heard in the cave, probably this is a noisy and festive procession, but what kind of holiday, why the noise - nothing more is said. And it is extremely curious: and this procession itself - what kind of consciousness and knowledge do its participants have? But not a word was said about this.

Many people have interpreted the metaphor of the cave. Plato could not imagine that an artist would enter into a dialogue on the theme of shadows in the cave of consciousness. Among the many participants in the Socratic dialogues, of course, there is no "artist"; Plato believed that fine art is the third farthest from eidos information: the artist reproduces the image of the table that the carpenter made, and the carpenter received the idea of ​​the table from the eidos.

The time of the Quattrocento revised this position - it was the artist who became the central figure; painting became equal to philosophy. The diligent admirer of antiquity, the Mantua artist Andrea Mantegna, became an interpreter (partly an opponent) of the Platonic view. (He signed his paintings "Padua", but Mantua became the main place of creativity, in Mantua he painted "Triumphs").

The central, most significant work of Mantegna is a giant polyptych (nine three-meter canvases), made on the theme of Plato's "State" and - since the controversy is on a metaphysical level - versions of the emergence of self-consciousness.

The polyptych is called "Caesar's Triumphs" and was written by its master for the last twenty years of his life. The idea was significant, it required work. However, twenty years, even if we recall all the precedents of long-term work, is something out of the ordinary.

Mantegna, who was one of the smartest men of his time, certainly knew what he was doing - and how can you imagine a genius wasting twenty years of time without a thoughtful plan? The greatest artist of Italy spends twenty years of precious life dedicated to labors and vigils - on nine gigantic canvases.

Andrea Mantegna was painfully rational - look at his dry, measured line, at his harsh, extremely mean images; it's not a light-washed "Rouen Cathedral at noon" - it's a firm and concise statement.

Mantegna is a very level-headed artist; wrote only masterpieces. Other pictures suffice for greatness; but this is the main thing. Vasari calls the "Triumphs of Caesar" the most important work of Mantegna. So, the theme is "The state and the consciousness of a citizen." You can see in the triumphs the image of the strata of society. The triumph of Caesar - and an endless series of slaves and warriors, going past us; the procession is crowned by the figure of the demiurge, looking from the height of the pedestal at the conquered peoples and the enthusiasm of the troops.

Andrea Mantegna, taking Plato's "state" as his starting point, was not going to be an illustrator: Renaissance artists are least of all illustrators. The Neoplatonists (Andrea Mantegna was precisely the Neoplatonist) interpreted the eidos through the concept of Logos - and the word for them is immanent to the image and essence, they are not illustrators, but embodyers of meaning.

The art of the Quattrocento (primarily painting, since painting is the central art of the Renaissance) is an invariant of philosophy. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci drew concepts of being, their works should be analyzed as philosophical writings; third on this list is Andrea Mantegna, a connoisseur of antiquity and interpreter of Plato. "The Triumphs of Caesar" - along with the Michelangelo Chapel and the "Suppers" by Leonardo - the most important work of the Italian Renaissance, at least in terms of the scale of the plan. If Michelangelo portrayed the genesis of history, Leonardo - the tragedy of faith, then Mantegna - the triumph of civilization. He painted society, and no one had painted this before him.

Of course, Benozzo Gozzili painted a very crowded procession (“Adoration of the Magi” in the Brancaccio Chapel), that they were nobles, they were even more or less representatives of the same clan; of course, Paolo Uccello painted hundreds of people fighting (“The Battle of San Romano”, a triptych today shared between the Louvre, the National Gallery in London and the Uffizi), but they are all soldiers; it is not a society. Mantegna painted everyone - even representatives of various nations - Africans, Europeans, Eastern peoples.

Each of the canvases depicts a fragment of a procession: slaves, warriors, captives, servants, horses, elephants pass by. It is curious that in one of the nine paintings the warriors carry strange standards on which cities are drawn (images of city plans are one of the favorite genres of the Quattrocento; perhaps these are cities conquered by the victors), so that even geographically this procession embraces the world, represents not a city, but empire. Siege engines, banners, weapons, silver and copper utensils - all the attributes of glory and power are carried past the viewer.

An unstoppable stream moves from right to left - warriors drive slaves, elephants drag countless treasures. All together, nine canvases form a giant frieze - like the friezes of Phidias in the Parthenon. The name "Caesar's Triumphs" cannot be further deciphered - probably one of the Gallic victories is meant, but something else is more important - this is the march of the empire that conquered the world. No city-state, from modern Mantegna, would not have been able to organize such a procession; in this regard, the Triumphs can be interpreted as a discourse on the empire - a remembrance or a prophecy.

The most accurate reference is to the procession depicted by Phidias on the bas-relief frieze of the Parthenon; most likely a paraphrase of a bas-relief from the southern wall of the Parthenon. The desire to create a sculpture in painting (to repeat the pathos of Phidias) is emphasized by the fact that Mantegna performed sketches in graphics and in the monochrome grisaille technique well, I'm talking about Mantegna, as if depicting not people, but walking statues.

Mantegna generally loved grisaille - for a painter who paints in color, the use of grisaille is equal to the inclusion of a document in the fabric of a novel, documentaries in a feature film. The artists of the Renaissance (and the Northern Renaissance as well, we can recall the grisailles of Van Eyck or Bosch) often turned to monochrome painting. Probably, there are several explanations here, in addition to the purely technical aspect of the craft (in grisaille you hone the formal drawing of volume): firstly, grisaille directly refers to ancient samples and, secondly, by drawing in the grisaille technique, the artist deliberately removes the emotional coloring of the event - translates him into a historical plan, the artist is likened to the chroniclers: it was like this - I do not embellish.

It is curious that Mantegna in his grisailles used a technique that was not characteristic of anyone and no one else encountered - the background of the picture, the space behind the monochrome sculptural figures, he depicted in the form of a chipped granite.

If you look at a break in a stone, you can see the movements of color streams, flashes of color formed by layers of different rocks - these flashes sometimes resemble lightning in the sky. So, the rock became a background depicting a stormy sky - literally embodying the metaphor "heavenly firmament".

This (but so important!) detail alone would be enough to understand the combination of Christian discourse with the ancient plot. In the final version of Triumphs, Mantegna flourished the sculptures, but his characters retained their sculptural nature: as if the artist wanted to depict not living people, but living monuments to victory. The effect of living and at the same time not quite real matter is aggravated by the fact that some slaves carry full armor on poles (probably taken from the enemy).

This armor - completely repeats the sculptural bodies, but they are empty - it's like a shell of a person. So, from the shell of a man, through his sculptural likeness to the living faces of some slaves, a story about a society of victory develops. The figures are drawn in natural size - and when we are in front of a thirty-meter work, the effect of "panorama" arises - the characters really move, this is an ever-lasting victory parade.

The population of empires tend to love victory parades - we feel more confident if our state is strong; here, especially for the joy of the patriotic layman, an eternally lasting parade is drawn. Not only that, the viewer has every reason to feel included in the procession, to feel what it is like to walk in the triumph of Caesar (slave or warrior - everyone chooses a role to taste). We look at Caesar from the bottom up, and the movement of the human flow picks up the viewer. This work is equal in scale to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, in the sense that both works concern all living things: we will all stand before God's judgment, and we are all earthly slaves.

Before Mantegna wrote the righteous - Christ, apostles, martyrs; I decided to spend the last years describing the triumph of power, I would like to say: depicting vanity. “Glory bought with blood”, in the words of the Russian poet, was equally condemned by the humanists of Russia and the humanists of Italy, but the artist stubbornly wrote, from year to year, intoxicated with servility and thirst for external dictates of the face. Why are the warriors marching so enthusiastically? Why do slaves obediently bend their necks? It's humiliating, absurd, pathetic! Why does the old man spend his last years portraying stupidity?

A parade of power is depicted, a demonstration of arrogance. The Danish prince Hamlet, watching the troops of Fortinbras defiling past him to fight, admired their determination and contrasted the soldier’s ardor with his reflection (“how everything around me exposes and hurries my sluggish revenge”), but Hamlet would not be a humanist if he chose the path of reckless , not verified by the mind of moving forward. He is not Fortinbras, which is why he is remarkable. And what can be said about the triumph of the victors, about the procession of enslaved peoples? This is not the army of the brave Fortinbrass, but a succession of slaves and soldiers carrying vain trophies.

People are drawn who are unable to isolate their existence from the crowd - everyone is attracted by the general movement in the ranks, they cannot escape from the parade of fuss. If the point is to show the vanity of triumph, then this is a very small point: one canvas would be enough to show the idiocy of the crowd. And it is a pity to spend twenty years and thirty meters on such a message. In subsequent centuries, many authors spent their lives glorifying vanity and strength, but this was not typical for Mantegna.

To sit for half a year over a Latin text is understandable, but he would not be able to serve the voluptuousness of nonentities for twenty years. By the way, the picture is not painted to order; more precisely - not at the behest of the Gonzago family, at whose court Mantegna lived. Perhaps he agreed on the idea with the old Lodovico Gonzago, a humanist - but he died, and the long-term creation of the picture took place without him.

The son of Lodovico, the militaristic Frederico, and the grandson of Francesco were far from the plan; and (judging by the side evidence) did not quite understand what was at stake. The portrait of Francesco (Mantegna depicted him as a warrior standing in front of the Madonna) shows how the artist saw his new patron: a young man in armor, with bulging eyes, an enthusiast; wet look. This character seemed to have descended from the canvases of “Caesar's Triumphs”, he could well have marched in the general ranks.

The mouth of the warrior Francesco is slightly open, and the viewer can see small sharp teeth. This is the face of a man who loves victory parades, it is not clear why he could not like Triumphs. But, apparently, he sensed a catch. The modern viewer also feels the catch. The main thing that strikes in the Triumphs is the major plot unusual for Mantegna. Mantegna is not an artist of victory, he is an artist of defeat.

Like every Stoic, like every existentialist, I venture to say - like every Christian (since Christian victory is possible only by death trampling death), Mantegna depicts not triumphs - but defeats. The plots of Mantegna are always disastrous plots: Saint Sebastian, the dead Christ, the Crucifixion, stories of torment in which there can be no external triumph. “Prayer for a cup” depicts the dream of the apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane” - shows the irresistible dream of the righteous, which likens sleepy bodies to dead bodies; oblivion and inability to resist evil, unheeded prayer: the cup has not passed.

Triumph is not at all what Mantegna sang, he was not an enthusiast of extras and a singer of violence, like Deineka, or Rodchenko, or Riefenstahl. He did not know how to rejoice in victory and colonization; in his time it often happened that a signoria ruined a neighboring city, cities asserted themselves at the expense of the humiliation of others - such vulgar joy disgusted him. The problem of portraying victory generally confronts a Christian - how to draw victory? The fire in Florence spared our moral consciousness, and today we do not know the work of Botticelli, written after the Pazzi conspiracy - Botticelli wrote the conspirators hanged on the windows of the Signoria.

Time is condescending to us and we do not know Velazquez's canvas, which could disgrace him - "The Expulsion of the Moriscos". We can fantasize, think that the complex composer Velazquez, who was able to create a contradictory work with a system of mirrors and a play of perspective, turned the plot in such a way that he did not justify violence.

But, in principle, a humanistic artist cannot draw violence, he has no right to do so. The Ferrara Cathedral keeps the greatest work of Cosme (Cosimo) Tour - “The Battle of St. George with the Dragon”, in which St. George allegedly defeats the Dragon, he struck the snake with a mortal, victorious blow.

However, in the knight's gesture there is no triumph, no jubilation. The knight fights in extreme fatigue, the movement of his hand is the movement of a very tired person. As a parallel to the work of Tours, it is appropriate to recall the movement of the hand of the condottiere Gatamelata in the equestrian statue by Donatello - the same deadly fatigue fetters the hand of the rider.

Not a triumphant gesture, not a proud posture, but the stoop and heavy movement of a tired man who does not consider military duty a holiday. How should a humanist write a triumphal procession? How can a humanist glorify the triumph? The next thought that visits the attentive viewer of "Triumphs" is this: if victory is depicted, then somewhere there must be defeat. If a triumph is drawn, humiliation is hidden somewhere. It is impossible to enslave a foreign country - and at the same time experience a set of trumpet emotions: someone else's bent neck will forever remain a reproach.

It is impossible to write a parade of athletes, a victory march - so as not to remember: what is it like for the humiliated. Mantegna cannot draw a victorious anthem. Triumph means something else to him. Mantegna attaches exceptional importance to details, his hero always keeps his mouth closed. Mantegna depicted not just closed, but tightly compressed lips.

The physiognomy of the heroes of Mantegna is remarkable: solid features with sharply defined details of the structure - the wings of the nose, wrinkles, bags under the eyes, the superciliary arches are drawn so hard, as if the artist works not with a brush, but with a chisel. (The self-portrait of the master is extremely important - both pictorial and sculptural: a bas-relief from the door of St. Andrew.)

The rigidity of the features conveys a stoic character; grief cripples a person, but people stand motionless, do not bend. The word is filtered through clenched lips, people endure being without dissolving their lips for lamentation. St. Joseph from the Berlin picture clenched his mouth so tightly that it seems he bit his lip on purpose so as not to vomit the word. A special theme is babies, they always sing or call at Mantegna; Babies' mouths are always slightly open.

And Francesco Gonzago's wet mouth is open, and we see small predatory teeth (a singing baby cannot have teeth, we don’t see teeth, we don’t see anything predatory in the guise of babies - and Francesco is dangerous).

It is noteworthy that behind the figure of Francesco Gonzago we see a bas-relief - Adam biting an apple, opening his mouth, exactly like Francesco.

Mantegna is extremely fond of the juxtaposition of the sculpture in the background and the human figure - one is revealed through the other, and it is not known: what is the key to what. The fall of Adam, expressed through a greedy bite, perhaps gives the key to understanding the facial expressions of Francesco Gonzago - and through the ruler: to understanding the structure of power. Fine art is generally woven from details, and there are no random details in art.

The image is woven from cross-cutting, passing through the centuries, rhymes, from replicas and responses to replicas, from what the artist noticed in other paintings, from what he saw and appropriated by his gaze. Picasso once expressed this idea in the following way: “an artist starts by wanting to paint a picture he likes, and then creates his own”.

Mantegna is an artist depicting the mournful withering, the stoic tension of a sinewy but doomed man - this feeling that visited the world of Europe at the end of the 15th century is not characteristic of Mantegna alone; it is a pervasive sense of the near end.

The closest Mantegna in this respect is the Ferrara master Cosme Tura.

His characters in their physiognomy are related to Mantenev's characters - the same sinewy, consisting of bones and tendons, nervous, twisted by life. The heroes of Cosme Tour seem to strain all their strength in the last, unbearable effort, his saint Jerome raises the stone of faith with such a doomed, earnest effort that it seems that the last forces have gone into this gesture - but he holds the stone of faith. Cosme Tura, who spent many years in his adolescence side by side with Mantegna (studied together with Squorcione), sometimes seems to finish what Mantegna prefers to keep silent about, pursing his lips.

The withering and death of Turo and Mantegna, and several other great masters of the northern Renaissance, were described practically by the same means - the problem they described was so obvious. Cosme Tura painted convulsed bodies, his saints seem to be in agony, such a tragic existence. The word "triumph" and the painting of Cosme Tour would be incompatible in principle.

But Mantegna also creates characters related to the Tour - exceptionally far from triumphant.

The rare-toothed old woman standing next to Christ, who was taken to the crowd with a noose around his neck, (Mantegna, “Behold the Man”, the Jacquemart André Museum in Paris) - and then the same old woman will later appear in Mantegna’s painting “The Dead Christ” (Brera Gallery, Milan, written in 1490) - this character is close to the aesthetics of Cosme Turo.

When the old woman is depicted at the body of the Savior (“Dead Christ”), we have the right to ask: is this really Mary? What if the Virgin was so changed by grief that she suddenly and heavily aged at the body of her son?

The Louvre “Pieta” (1478) by Cosme Tours depicts the body of Christ reduced by a death cramp and a Madonna with a puffy, aged face, so dissimilar to the appearance of the Virgin, familiar to us from the early Renaissance and the paintings of southern masters. Twenty years after the old woman Mantegna (1508), a similar old woman with the same rare-toothed mouth was painted by the Venetian Giorgione, and if the image of the old woman Giorgione is usually explained as a symbol of the frailty of beauty, like the sunset of the Renaissance, then how to explain the unexpectedly old, dried up in the mountain Our Lady ?

Generally speaking, Mary was actually an elderly woman, she was probably about fifty years old at the time of the crucifixion of her son - but when Mantegna writes her as she is in reality, he breaks with the tradition that portrayed the Virgin forever young.

The old woman standing behind the shoulder of Christ in the painting “Behold the Man” is so terrible that it is almost impossible to recognize Mary in her - but who is she, if not Mary? The mouth bared in a silent scream is an expression of mortal effort, but also an expression of greed for the last sips of life; the master gave this grin to the Virgin, and Francesco Gonzago, and the archer shooting at Sebastian - what do they have in common, if not the frailty of the era? And what is triumphant in this grin?

The old woman Giorgione, and the old woman Mantegna, and the old woman Brueghel - they are all very similar. It was, included in the aesthetics of the late Renaissance, a sense of death, finale. And the sunset feeling (not triumphant at all) passes - albeit only as one of the themes of the picture - through all the works of Mantegna.

It is extremely important that the sunset, death and finale (in particular, the visual old age of the Mother of God) allow interpretations as Christian - that is, leading to the resurrection, as well as purely physiological: the old woman Giorgione is obviously doomed to decay. Immediately before the “Portrait of an Old Woman,” Brueghel painted “Mad Greta” (1528), a crazy old woman who wanders through war-ravaged cities. Greta's features, her mouth half-open in a toothless scream, are easily recognized by us - this is the same strange old woman Mantegna Giorgione - an inhabitant of the northern Italian Quattrocento, either the Mother of God, or a crazy beggar.

This is a general - and this is not a triumphal theme at all, it sounds everywhere, it sounds like a sharp painful note. Let's add here the fact that "Triumphs" is written by an old man - according to the concepts of the 15th century, a decrepit old man.

The similarity, or rather, not similarity, but the roll call and through rhymes of different masters is quite understandable.

The problem of replicating someone else's work for the creators of the Quattrocento era is no less acute than today, when postmodern aesthetics legalized borrowing and made reminiscences a creative method.

The figure of Caesar in the “Triumphs” in posture, posture and position raised above the crowd - repeats the Roman rulers from the sarcophagi, but also repeats the pose of Gian Galeazzo Visconti from the fresco by Masaccio in the Brancaccio chapel (“Resurrection of the son of Theophilus and St. Peter on the pulpit”).

Mantegna could see the fresco, and Visconti (the cruel Duke of Milan rose as a result of the war between Venice and Genoa) was a symbol of domineering Italy. In the leapfrog of the political regimes of the Italian cities, the power of the financial oligarchies easily replaced democracy, inevitably provoked uprisings, followed by tyrannies; in the course of this reshuffling of power, the figures of intriguing usurpers, like Visconti, became a symbol.

Is a distant analogy valid in the analysis of an image? - we do not know for sure whether Mantegna looked at the fresco by Masaccio or not. As we do not know, whether Michelangelo consciously in the figures of sinners from the Sistine Chapel, as well as in the sculptures of slaves - was guided by Mantegna. The Bound Slave (made by Michelangelo in 1513 for the tomb of Julius) repeats the plasticity and foreshortening of St. Sebastian in 1506, made by Mantegna for Gonzago.

Mantegna himself undoubtedly thought about the frieze of Phidias, about the canon of Polykleitos - in the spearman from the "Triumphs" it is easy to guess the plasticity of Doryphorus. These roll calls - from creator to creator, from image to image, from sculptural frieze to painting, from fresco in Florence to canvases in Mantua, from Mantegna to Giorgione, from Giorgione to Brueghel - create the effect of inclusiveness.

In the case of a long, twenty-year writing of the Triumphs, allusions and borrowings from other works are inevitable, rhymes and parallels are justified. And how could it be otherwise: before us is an encyclopedia of power, a set of ideas about the Italian system of government. The idea is huge - to show the whole society, the whole civilization; it is a compendium of knowledge about man and society.

Mantegna approached the work on the Triumphs as an elderly man, with a well-established method and a well-formed intonation - the intonation of the harsh truth taught many to speak plainly, and frightened many.

In Hemingway's book “Farewell to Arms”, the heroine Catherine, listing the artists, gives the following description of Mantegna: “many nail holes. Very scary".

Mantegna painted very few nail holes - but there is a sense of permanent tragedy on his canvases. The tragedy is also present in the Triumphs - it does not even consist in the fact that we look at the slaves from a slavish point of view, from the bottom up; the demiurge rises above us. You don't like this position? Well, what to do, be patient; it's not a tragedy yet. Tragedy is in the frailty of triumph, in the vanity of victory.

And if the old artist painted a pagan triumph, a pagan victory parade, and conveyed Derzhavin's words with precise, restrained strokes: "he will devour eternity with his mouth" - is this not a tragedy? After all, except for someone else's victory, the slaves have nothing. But there is no victory either.

The work “The Triumph of Caesar” by Mantegna means this: Mantegna depicted how our consciousness works. Plato, as you know, described our position in the cave as follows: we stand with our backs to the entrance and see only the shadows falling on the wall of the cave. Andrea Mantegna did an amazing thing: he turned the viewer to face the object that casts a shadow on the wall of the cave, and it turned out that the procession that casts the shadow is a triumphal procession of slaves.

That is, for the first time we saw what forms our consciousness.

For the first time, Plato's metaphor was fully, literally illustrated.

Cave? Here you, the audience, are in the cave. Procession? Here she is, in front of you. It turns out that our consciousness is formed by the stratification of the state.

Man is a social animal, but Mantegna says that even the consciousness of a person, not only his functions, even his consciousness is subject to the stratification of society.

By the way, it will be said that it was at the same time, in parallel with the Triumphs, that Mantegna wrote “The Descent of Christ into Limbo” several times (cf. with the icon-painting plot “The Descent into Hell”); the painting depicts Jesus in front of a gaping cave entrance. And if the entrance to Hell is so simply depicted, then the desire to draw a mortal reality is not surprising.

Mantegna made the viewer see the cruelty of the state, which controls our ideas of good and evil, the inferiority of power, power and heartlessness at the same time - that is, the artist did what Plato does not even talk about - he explored an object that casts a shadow that forms consciousness. The next inevitable question is: is our consciousness moral and does the highest category of “good” exist outside of Christian morality? Our consciousness is woven from the shadows cast by this procession - look carefully what it is like, this procession of enslaved peoples: if there is a place for morality in this process?

Is it possible that the consciousness of free citizens, of a self-satisfied nation, of a self-satisfied state - does our self-consciousness exist thanks to the humiliation of other people? Does this mean that the consciousness of a free citizen is a function of the humiliation of a slave?

Statehood and the nature of power is the most debated issue of the Italian Renaissance, both in philosophy and in painting; in fact, the proto-Renaissance, in the person of Dante, formulated the basic premises - but the Quattrocento period made these provisions painfully relevant. And how could it be otherwise? Plato (all humanists started from Plato) raised the issue of statehood as radically important for the concepts of "good" and "justice".

The death of Greek democracy, the destruction of Roman democracy, the precarious position of the Italian demos - all this made humanistic studies dramatic.

The world of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his court, the world of the Gonzago family, under whose wing Mantegna existed, or the d'Este family, who patronized Cosme of Tours - the time allotted for humanistic creativity in these palaces - were largely due to the Treaty of Lodia in 1458.

The long-awaited treaty, which ended the strife, provided a short-lived (but so long for a human life!) balance between the rival Italian states. The Duchy of Milan, the Signoria of Florence, the Papal State, the Republic of Venice finally found some kind of balanced regime of relations - until 1498, before the invasion of the French Charles VIII.

At this time, Florence Medici flourished, and Mantegna's work fell precisely on these years. Peaceful coexistence ensured the quiet life of cities located at the intersection of the interests of states - in Mantua (where Mantegna lived) or in Ferrara (where Cosme Tura) it was possible to work calmly.

Mantegna traveled little. In his youth and in his younger years he traveled - but in his mature years he did not like to leave his native walls. The approval of the law became the main theme of Mantegna. Andrea Mantegna is a strict artist, demonstratively following the rules. Not academic patterns, he understood the law on a metaphysical level. Social law and drawing rules are comparable values.

Mantegna valued the law everywhere - in the state system, in anatomy, in human relations. The artist of unpleasant truth is like a pedantic doctor who thinks that knowledge of a terminal illness will help his patient.

Mantegna constantly puts the viewer in an uncomfortable position with unpleasantly precise speech - so we are lost in the presence of someone who is able to judge our actions. It is impossible to live forever comparing life with the law; and in the presence of Mantegna's paintings there is just such a feeling.

Mantegna constantly makes it so that we are forced to test our worth; for example, in front of the body of the dead Christ. Who else, except today's millions of viewers, could see the dead Christ like this, from top to bottom, at their feet.

A picture painted from the point of view of Joseph of Arimathea (and who else could see the body of the tortured, taken down from the cross of Jesus from such an angle - only one Joseph, who removed him from the cross; sometimes artists depict John the Theologian and Nicodemus in scenes of removal from the cross, but in only Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in the gospels), forces us today to measure our moral strength with great examples. And most often, we do not have enough strength to look at and understand and compare, we move away from the picture, without giving anything to it and without taking anything from it.

It is interesting to compare Mantegna's painting "Dead Christ" with the famous work of Hans Holbein's "Dead Christ in the tomb", with the very painting that Prince Myshkin saw at Parfyon Rogozhin's (in a copy, of course), and the writer Dostoevsky saw this painting in Basel in the original and was quite impressed.

The dead Christ of Holbein is depicted in a coffin, we look at the body from the side, we see the full profile of a dead, tortured man; we see rearing ribs, a sharp nose, thin legs. The deceased makes an unpleasant impression (there is a legend that Holbein painted the image from a drowned man), which, as Dostoevsky believed, could shake faith.

It is not clear from what point of view it was necessary to look at the deceased in order to see the body in this way: this is an artificial position. It is this artificiality of the angle that does not allow you to be fully frightened. This is a symbol, a declaration, but by no means a reality - we are not physically able to look at Christ like that, and the apostles of the Teacher did not see it that way either. The picture of Mantegna is made in such a way that we are, as it were, brought to the body - we really are standing near the deceased, we even look down at him.

The small size of Holbein's painting does not allow us to consider the image as a reality; the artificiality of art levels the effect of a terrible picture. Mantegna reproduces human proportions so deliberately that involvement in the death of Jesus becomes commonplace. In the same row, one should put the most tragic, the most realistically disfigured by the torment of Jesus - the brushes of Matthias Grunewald.

The Isenheim altar took on the image of the Savior on the cross, monstrous in its hopeless torment. Worn out by beatings, distorted by convulsions, the body does not promise any resurrection - we are faced with the fact of murder and must realize the murder, which happened forever and lasts forever, in which everyone is involved in one way or another. Grunewald's pathos was adopted by many anti-fascist artists five centuries later. Mantegna said more simply: look, the Savior lies at your feet.

He is the Son of God, but he is stretched out before you - having died for you. What do you think about this? All three images have little in common with the usual icon-painting canon; the classic Orthodox “Man of Sorrows” and “Shroud” do not point (despite the sad plot) to specific bodily torments.

The three things listed: an Italian, a German Catholic, and a German who eventually became an Englishman (although friendship with More made Holbein subject to Catholic influence) are not icons at all; it is secular art. This is a conversation about religion with a person who is not necessarily a believer, but is necessarily moral. The paintings were painted with an interval of fifteen years - Mantegna made his thing in 1490, Grunewald in 1506, Holbein in 1522; all three works, each in its own way, involve the viewer in the action.

For Mantegna, including the viewer in the action was a deliberate compositional strategy.

As proof of the last proposition, I will refer to the evolution of the image of St. Sebastian.

Mantegna addressed the plot three times; the image of an officer who opposed his state system contrary to army discipline, shot by his soldiers, seemed to him significant for his own time.

He first painted Sebastian in 1458 (the painting is in Vienna): the saint is depicted against the background of ancient ruins, tied to the base of a destroyed triumphal arch (the theme of triumph appears even then); that is, when drawing statehood, as is clearly demonstrated, it is flawed and destroyed - especially since the artist puts his signature in Greek.

A characteristic detail: the destroyed sculpture on the right hand of Sebastian repeats his plasticity - but Sebastian is standing, and the Roman statue has crumbled.

The version of 1480 is different: Sebastian is still in the ancient city, tied to a Corinthian column, and archers appear in the picture. More precisely, the heads of archers appear, written at the level of our heads - the picture was in the altar of San Zeno in Verona (now in the Louvre) and was strengthened so that the heads of the archers were flush with the heads of the audience.

The archers from the picture enter into a dialogue with us, one of the archers is turned in our direction and slightly opened (grinned) his mouth, as if calling us, inviting us to take part in the shooting.

The final version of 1506 - this painting remained in the workshop of the master when he died - does not contain any secondary details at all: no ancient ruins, no Greek inscriptions. Hopeless darkness and a body twisted by effort (Michelangelo will repeat this effort in Matthew) - and now we can rightly assume that Sebastian is simply placed in front of us. It is we who contemplate his torment - and perhaps we shoot Sebastian.

The saint is painted like a Van Gogh tree, he is painted like a hero of the execution of Goya, he is made with the same tenacious line as Daumier's laundresses - Sebastian stands firmly. (I want, although this leads away from the argument, but nevertheless, it is important to pay attention to the face of this last Sebastian: the martyr seems to sing. His mouth is open as if for a hymn, sung with all his might. babies - when he painted the baby Jesus, he made sure that the child seemed to sing. Here - the mouth of Sebastian, twisted with flour, seems to sing a hymn.)

The intonation is always even, Mantegna never raises his voice, he speaks with stubborn and even monotonous force. There are no bright colors in the picture, no ecstatic gestures of the characters, no distorted faces - but, despite the balanced tone, a general atmosphere of exorbitant exertion is created. Compressed lips, concentrated glances, frowning foreheads, gloomy coloring, ruthlessly precise lines of the drawing - all this makes us experience catharsis in those scenes where, it would seem, nothing affected is happening.

Here is the scene of the blessing of the baby Jesus by the elder Simeon the God-Receiver; The Presentation is an extremely blissful and even touching scene; Mantegna dryly retelling the circumstances of the meeting of the holy family with Simeon, makes this scene tragic. The artist depicts the baby swaddled as an Egyptian mummy is swaddled, the baby's diapers resemble a shroud. (See the Berlin painting "Candlemas".)

Jesus appears as if before the position in the tomb, as if before us is a rehearsal of burial, and not at all the joy of entering into life. The face of Joseph, the husband of Mary, is striking. Joseph looks from the depths of the picture sternly and even with hostility, his lips compressed forever will not let out a single word, his eyes look from under his brows with unrelenting anger. The baby - in which the artist seems to see the deceased in advance - is the most characteristic theme for Mantegna. Both in the Berlin Madonna and in the Madonna from the Brera Gallery in Milan, the baby in the mother's arms is as if dead - and the aria is in a daze.

And now transfer all this feeling of an eternally lasting catastrophe, overcome by moral effort, into the Triumphs - and ask yourself: what could be the meaning of the work? Why is it? Mantegna in the last years of his life was engaged in something that could be compared with the "splitting of the atom" - he showed the inconsistency of the original eidos, the lack of integrity in the object that casts a shadow.

It is essential to include in the analysis of the "Triumphs" a modern book by Mantegna - "The Hypnoeratomachy of Poliphilus" by Francesco Colonna, a priest and preacher.

The Hypnoerotomachia Poliphilus is a book about a journey through a dream within a dream - a completely Platonic sequence of disincarnation.

Polyphilus makes his travels in a dream, acquiring a different reality, more authentic than the one he touches. Mantegna was a faithful reader of the Column - in his later paintings there are direct quotes: rocks destroyed by time to the appearance of monsters. And the fact that our consciousness is a journey in the world of shadows, that is, in a dream that is dreaming, and the dream itself is civilization - all this is said very consistently.

The work of twenty years was left without attention. For two hundred years, the canvases were forgotten, were not exhibited anywhere, were acquired by the English king Charles the First in 1629 and placed in the dark hall of the Hampton Court country palace, where they are still located and where a rare viewer notices them. Thus, Mantegna's metaphysical reasoning received a worthy conclusion: explaining the origin of the shadows that form the images of consciousness, the artist painted a reality that casts shadows - and it turned out that the cause of our consciousness is the triumphal procession of slaves.

Subsequently, this procession of slaves was placed in such a hopeless shadow of a distant hall, in such a dark cave, where they could no longer cast a shadow and no longer influenced anyone's formation.

What is curious here is this: The concept of "shadow" for the ancient and for the Christian perception is not identical. The shadow for Plato and the shadow for Thomas Aquinas have very different meanings. The nature of the shadow is interpreted in icon painting as an evil inclination - and there is not and cannot be a double reading. The iconography and painting of the Renaissance before Piero della Francesco does not know the shadow at all: to paint a saint in the shade or with a face changed by the play of chiaroscuro is nonsense.

For example, in Dante's poem "the world of shadows" is not a world of meanings - the meaning is a bright light. Dante, who constantly talks about the topics of Platonic dialogues, imagines the ideal as an even radiance - and his guide Virgil (the ancient sage, to whom meaning is revealed in the shadows) cannot enter the world of light. Leonardo also imagines an ideal design world as an even radiance.

Mantegna, who was a Neo-Platonist, that is, he matched the Christian idea of ​​the first paradigm with the Platonic teaching, came up with a strange answer to this.

He painted three-dimensional sculptures woven with chiaroscuro and casting shadows - now we see how things work in a cave, how a shadow is formed.

Since now the object that casts the shadow is clearly visible to us, we can notice that the idea (shadow) and the entity that sends the idea (the procession, in this case) are not identical at all.

The procession that casts a shadow is contradictory and vain; in a triumphal procession, the victim and the winner, the master and the slave, the captive and the master are intertwined into a single whole. It is paradoxical that the shadow cast by these figures on the wall of the cave will be common. Plato does not write about this - more precisely, the indivisibility of the eidos does not allow us to assume that something is not right inside the sending itself.

Plato was a poet, he spoke the word better than most playwrights, but when he wrote about the "procession and triumph" - he did not consider it necessary to see it as a dirty trick. But the shadow (idea) is formed from the conjugation of the bodies of the master and the slave - that's the horror. The figures of enemies can have a common shadow - and accordingly, our consciousness will feed on a common idea. But the root cause, that which cast this shadow, that which created our consciousness, is contradictory.

Civilization - and history; knowledge - and faith; Mantegna wrote precisely about this contradiction. This is a great work of neo-Platonism, as it should, I believe, be read. This is exactly how, I think, the picture was interpreted by Colonna, although one can only guess on this score.

Today, looking at the Triumphs of Mantegna, try to compare the greatness of the state discourse with the fragility of the individual consciousness; Pushkin once did so in The Bronze Horseman. When we are carried away by an abstract state idea, and your consciousness is in the power of shadows - try to turn your face to the entrance to the cave and see what exactly casts this magical shadow.

The painting by Andrea Mantegna “Prayer for the Chalice” has another name “Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane”. Five angels appear to the praying Christ, while the three apostles sleep in the foreground, unaware that Judas and a crowd of soldiers are coming with the intention of taking Christ into custody. In this scene, everything - fantastic bizarre rocks, an imaginary city, hard folds of matter - is written in a detailed, solid and precise manner, inherent in the painter and engraver Andrea Mantegna.

Andrea Mantegna was of humble origin, but adopted and trained by a simple little-known painter, he became one of the most significant artists of his time. The style of Andrea Mantegna, like the style of other Renaissance masters, was formed under the influence of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. Many of his works are indeed executed as grisaille - a picturesque imitation of marble or bronze relief.

For most of his life, Mantegna was the court painter of the Duke of Mantua, for whom he collected a large collection of classical art. From 1460 Andrea Mantegna lived in Mantua at the court of Lodovico Gonzaga (in 1466–1467 he visited Florence and Pisa, in 1488–1490 he visited Rome). In the murals of the "Camera degli Sposi" in the castle of San Giorgio (1474), the artist, achieving a visual-spatial unity of the interior, realized the idea of ​​synthesis of real and "painted" architecture.

The illusionistic effects of these paintings, in particular the imitation of a round window in the ceiling, anticipate Correggio's similar quest. The severe spirit of Roman antiquity is imbued with a series of monochrome cardboards by Andrea Mantegna with the “Triumph of Caesar” (1485–1488, 1490–1492, Hampton Court, London). Among the later works of Mantegna are allegorical and mythological compositions for the study of Isabella d "Este ("Parnassus" or "The Kingdom of Venus", 1497, Louvre, Paris), a cycle of monochrome paintings, including "Samson and Delilah" (1500s, National Gallery, London), full of drama and compositional sharpness, the canvas “Dead Christ” (about 1500, Brera Gallery, Milan).

The painter Andrea Mantegna was also an innovator in engraving, and his prints on antique themes later influenced Dürer in particular. The graphic works of Mantegna (the cycle of engravings on copper “The Battle of the Sea Gods”, circa 1470), which are almost as good as his paintings in terms of chased monumentality of images, combine sculptural plasticity with the tenderness of line modeling.

Andrea Mantegna combined the main artistic aspirations of the Renaissance masters of the 15th century: a passion for antiquity, an interest in accurate and thorough, down to the smallest detail, transmission of natural phenomena and selfless faith in linear perspective as a means of creating an illusion of space on a plane. His work became the main link between the early Renaissance in Florence and the later flowering of art in Northern Italy.

Andrea Mantegna was called during his lifetime "another Leonardo" - meaning the complexity, thoughtfulness and encryption of the message

Plato explained how the human consciousness works: we recall the knowledge given to us from the beginning. We have knowledge unknown to ourselves because our consciousness belongs to a single eidos. Plato understood the word “eidos” as something like a “project” of humanity: eidos is an internal form of the world, it is a conglomeration of transcendent entities. The process of remembering is this: our consciousness is like a cave, and knowledge and ideas appear on the walls of this cave, like shadows. We react to the shadows flickering on the walls of the cave, we describe these shadows, we give them meaning, and through the metaphors associated with these shadows, we regain our original knowledge.

Plato says that the shadows that appear on the walls of the cave are cast by processions passing by the entrance to the cave.

What kind of processions they are and what kind of shadows they cast, Plato (the story is told on behalf of Socrates in the dialogue “State”, but Plato came up with this metaphor) does not specify. He writes that the cymbals and timpani of the procession are heard in the cave. This is probably a noisy and festive procession, but what kind of holiday, why the noise - nothing more is said. And it is extremely curious: and this procession itself - what kind of consciousness and recollection of knowledge do its participants have? But not a word about it. Many have interpreted what has been said. Plato could not imagine that an artist would enter into a dialogue on the topic of shadows in the cave of consciousness. Among the many participants in the Socratic dialogues, of course, there is no "artist"; Plato believed that fine art is a secondary and even tertiary thing: the artist reproduces the image of the table that the carpenter made, and the carpenter received the idea of ​​the table from eidos.

The time of the Quattrocento revised this position - and this is all the more remarkable because the Neoplatonist, a diligent admirer of antiquity, the Mantua artist Andrea Mantegna, became an opponent. The central, most significant work of Mantegna is a giant polyptych (nine three-meter canvases), made on the theme of Plato's "State" and - since the controversy is on a metaphysical level - versions of the emergence of self-consciousness.

Mantegna painted these things - the main canvases in his life - for twenty years. And then to say, the idea was significant, it required work. However, twenty years, even if we recall all the precedents of long-term work, is something out of the ordinary. Mantegna, who was one of the smartest men of his time, certainly knew what he was doing - and how can you imagine a genius wasting twenty years of time without a thoughtful plan? The greatest painter of Italy spends twenty years of his precious life dedicated to labors and vigils - on nine gigantic canvases. It is unlikely that he did it unconsciously. Oh no, Andrea Mantegna was painfully rational - look at his dry, measured line, at his hard, extremely mean images. This is not "Rouen Cathedral in the rain" - this is a firm and concise statement.

Paradoxically, this most important work of Mantegna has remained - almost to this day - unknown or little known. Mantegna is a very even artist; he wrote only masterpieces. So other pictures are enough for his greatness, but this one is the main one.

So, the topic is “The state and the consciousness of a citizen”. The starting point is Plato's "State", a dialogue about the concepts of justice, eidos, consciousness, reminiscent of the original knowledge. It is tempting to say that the artist Andrea Mantegna illustrated Plato's thought, but to say so is not true: Renaissance artists are least of all illustrators. The Neoplatonists (Andrea Mantegna was just a Neoplatonist) interpreted the eidos through the concept of logos - and the word for them is immanent to the image and essence, they are not illustrators, but incarnates. The art of the Quattrocento (primarily painting, since painting is the central art of the Renaissance) is an invariant of philosophy.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci drew concepts of being, their works should be analyzed as philosophical writings. Third on this list is Andrea Mantegna, a connoisseur of antiquity and interpreter of Plato.

A. Mantegna. "The Triumph of Caesar. Scene I"

Andrea Mantegna in the last years of his life wrote the "Triumphs of Caesar" - along with the Michelangelo Chapel and the "Suppers" by Leonardo. This polyptych is the main work of the Italian Renaissance. "Triumphs" are nine huge canvases, each about three meters long. Each of the canvases depicts a fragment of the procession: slaves, warriors, captives, horses, elephants pass in front of us. An unstoppable stream of people is depicted, the stream of people moves from right to left - they carry standards, jewelry, weapons, utensils. It is a symbol of the strength and glory of the state and civilization. An ancient triumph is a traditional procession of slaves and warriors carrying trophies and tribute. Triumph is the apogee of the state triumph after the victory over the enemy. Together, nine canvases form a giant frieze - like the friezes of Phidias in the Parthenon. The name "Caesar's Triumphs" defies further deciphering - it is not clear which of the specific triumphs is depicted, the most accurate reference to the procession depicted by Phidias on the bas-relief frieze of the Parthenon. Most likely, this is a paraphrase of a bas-relief from the southern wall of the Parthenon: sacrificial animals are being led, captives are walking, musicians are playing in front. The desire to create a sculpture in painting (that is, to repeat the pathos of Phidias) is emphasized by the fact that Mantegna performed sketches in the monochrome grisaille technique, as if depicting not people, but walking statues. Mantegna was generally fond of grisaille - for a painter who paints in color, the use of grisaille is tantamount to including a dry document in the fabric of a novel.

A. Mantegna. "The Triumph of Caesar. Scene II"

And Mantegna, when he wrote his monochrome triumphs, was likened to chroniclers and chroniclers: look, it was like this - I do not embellish. In the case of his final canvas (more precisely, nine canvases), he wrote a kind of triumph of triumphs. Before us are not living people, but monuments, sculptures, but as if monuments come to life - monuments to victory. The triumph of civilization as a whole.

Previously, Mantegna painted the Crucifixion and St. Sebastian, the dead Christ and the Presentation, but decided to spend his last years on triumphs. I would like to say: the image of vanity. “Glory bought with blood”, in the words of the Russian poet, was equally condemned by both the humanists of Russia and the humanists of Italy, but he stubbornly wrote, from year to year, these faces drunk with servility and thirst for external dictates. Why are they marching so merrily? It's humiliating, absurd, pathetic! Why does the great old man spend his last years portraying stupidity?

A parade is depicted, a demonstration of power and arrogance. People are drawn who are unable to isolate their existence - everyone is attracted by the general movement in the ranks, they can no longer escape from the parade of fuss.

If the point is to show the vanity of triumph, then this is a very small point: one canvas would be enough to show the idiocy of the crowd. And it is a pity to waste twenty years on such a message.

That is, today it is normal: today it is customary to spend life glorifying vanity, but for Mantegna this was not typical. He could sit for six months over the Latin text - this is understandable. But he could not serve the voluptuousness of nonentities for half a year (not to mention twenty years).

Imagine that a great artist, a wise man (a connoisseur of Latin and ancient texts) spends years on a conceited picture (or exposing vanity, which is the same thing) - doesn’t he feel sorry for the time? By the way, this is the only painting of the Renaissance that was not painted to order - the artist painted against the will of the Gonzago family, at whose court he lived. Or rather, we do not know if there was an agreement: perhaps (this is an assumption), he explained the idea to the great humanist Ludovico Gonzaga - but he soon died. His son, the militaristic youth Federico, and grandson Francesco were far from the plan and (judging by the letters) did not understand what was at stake. Mantegna wrote exclusively at his own request, contrary to all market (they didn’t say so then, but nonetheless) agreements.

A. Mantegna. "The Triumph of Caesar. Scene IX"

He made nine canvases to exacerbate the impression of an extended procession, to make the viewer a literal witness to the procession - this is a titanic work. The figures are drawn in natural size - and when we are in front of this thirty-meter work, the effect of the "Borodino Panorama" appears - the characters really walk, really move, an eternally lasting triumph.

Not only that, we have every reason to feel included in the procession of slaves, to feel what it is like to walk in the triumph of Caesar. This work is on a scale equal to Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" in the sense that it concerns us all: we will all stand before God's judgment and we are all earthly slaves. Moreover, Michelangelo in his figures of sinners, as well as in the sculptures of slaves, often focused on Mantegna: the slaves made for the tomb of Julius II often repeat the angle of the slave Mantegna, and the “Bound Slave” (made in 1513) exactly repeats the plasticity and angle of the saint Sebastian Mantegna, 1506, made for Gonzaga; Mantegna himself thought about the frieze of Phidias - he was an ambitious man. Mantegna approached the work on the Triumphs as a mature person, with well-established methods and a well-formed intonation - this intonation of the harsh truth taught many to speak unvarnished, but to the point. Here the procession of slaves is clearly shown, and we are in it, among other slaves. You don't like this position? Well, what to do? Be patient.

The work “The Triumph of Caesar” by Mantegna means this: the artist depicted how our consciousness works. Plato, as is known, described our situation in the cave as follows: we stand with our backs to the entrance and see only the shadows falling on the wall of the cave. Andrea Mantegna did an amazing thing: he turned the viewer to face what was casting a shadow on the wall of the cave, and it turned out that the procession casting the shadow was a triumphal procession of slaves. That is, for the first time we saw what forms our consciousness.

Mantegna made the viewer see the cruelty of the state, which controls our ideas of good and evil, the inferiority of power, its power and heartlessness at the same time, that is, he did something that Plato does not even talk about - he studied an object that casts a shadow that forms consciousness. The next inevitable question is: does our consciousness or the highest category of Platonism “good” morally exist outside of Christian morality?

Our consciousness is woven from the shadows cast by this procession - well, look carefully, what is it like, this procession of enslaved peoples?

Is it possible that our consciousness of free citizens, of a self-satisfied nation, of a self-satisfied state - does our consciousness exist due to the humiliation of other people? Does this mean that the consciousness of a free citizen is a function of the humiliation of a slave?

Statehood and the nature of power is one of the most debated issues of the Italian Renaissance, both in philosophy and in painting; in fact, the proto-Renaissance, in the person of Dante, formulated the basic premises, but the Quattrocento period made these provisions painfully relevant. And how could it be otherwise? Plato (and all humanists started from Plato) raised the issue of statehood as radically important for the concepts of “good” and “justice”. The death of Greek democracy, the destruction of Roman democracy, the precarious position of the Italian demos - all this made humanistic studies dramatic. The world of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his court, the world of the Gonzaga family, under whose wing Mantegna existed, or the d'Este family, who patronized Cosme Tura - the peace and time allotted for humanistic creativity in these palaces - were largely due to the Treaty of Lodia of 1454 The long-awaited treaty, which ended the strife, provided a short-lived (but so long for a human life!) balance between the rival Italian states.The Duchy of Milan, the Signoria of Florence, the Papal State, the Republic of Venice finally found some kind of balanced regime of relations - until 1494, before the invasion of the French Charles VIII. At this time, Florence Medici flourished, and Mantegna's work fell precisely on these years. Peaceful coexistence ensured the quiet life of cities located at the intersection of the interests of states - in Mantua (where Mantegna lived) or in Ferrara (where Cosme Tura) can be was easy to work in. Mantegna traveled little. traveled in his youth and in his younger years, but in his mature years he did not like to leave his native walls. The observance and approval of the law became the main theme of Mantegna. He understood the law on a metaphysical level. Andrea Mantegna is a very strict artist, he is an artist who follows the rules indicatively. True, these rules are not burdensome academic patterns, but the criteria of authenticity in drawing established by him. However, these are strict drawing rules. Why not compare the rules of the drawing with the state law? Social law and drawing rules are comparable and even interdependent quantities. Mantegna appreciated the law everywhere - in the state system, in Latin grammar, in anatomy, in human relations.

Mantegna was very fond of putting the viewer in an uncomfortable position with a true story - for example, in front of the body of the dead Christ.

Who else, besides us, today's millions of viewers, could see the dead Christ like this, from top to bottom, at our feet? Written, from the point of view of Joseph of Arimathea, the picture (and who else could see the body of the tortured, taken down from the cross of Jesus from such an angle? - only one Joseph, who removed him from the cross; sometimes artists depict John the Theologian and Nicodemus in scenes of removal from the cross , but only Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in the Gospels) forces us today to measure our moral strength with great examples. And most often we do not have enough strength to look at, understand and compare, we move away from the picture, giving nothing to it and taking nothing from it.

A. Mantegna. "Dead Christ"

It is interesting to compare Mantegna's painting "The Dead Christ" with the famous work of Hans Holbein's "The Dead Christ in the Coffin", with the very picture that Prince Myshkin saw at Parfyon Rogozhin's (in a copy, of course), and the writer Dostoevsky saw this picture in Basel, in the original and was quite impressed. The dead Christ of Holbein is depicted in a coffin, we look at the body from the side, we see the full profile of a dead, tortured man; we see rearing ribs, a sharp nose, thin legs. The deceased makes an unpleasant impression (there is a legend that Holbein painted the image of a drowned man), which, as Dostoevsky believed, could shake faith. It is not clear from what point of view it was necessary to look at the deceased in order to see the body in this way: this is an artificial position. It is this artificiality of the angle that does not allow you to be fully frightened. This is a symbol, this is a declaration, but not a reality in any way - we are not physically able to look at Christ like that, and the apostles did not see him like that either.

G. Holbein the Younger. "Dead Christ"

The picture of Mantegna is made in such a way that we are, as it were, brought to the body - we really are standing near the deceased, we even look down at him. The small size of Holbein's painting does not allow us to consider the image as a reality; the artificiality of art levels the effect of a terrible picture. Mantegna draws so convincingly and so deliberately reproduces human proportions that involvement in the death of Jesus becomes commonplace.

In the same row, one should put the most tragic, the most realistically disfigured by the teachings of Jesus - the brushes of Matthias Grunewald. The Isenheim altar took on the image of the Savior on the cross, and this is a monstrous image of the Son of God in its hopeless torment. Exhausted by beatings, distorted by convulsions, the body does not promise any resurrection - we are faced with the fact of murder and must realize the murder, in which everyone is involved in one way or another.

It's a very harsh picture, she accuses. Grunewald's pathos was adopted by many anti-fascist artists five centuries later. Mantegna said more simply, but also more ruthlessly: look, the Savior lies at your feet. He is the Son of God, but he, in all his greatness, is prostrate before you - for your sake he accepted torment and death. What do you think about this? Look: He is at your feet.

All three images have little in common with the usual icon-painting canon; the classical Orthodox “Man of Sorrows” and “Shroud” do not point (despite the sad plot) to specific bodily torments. The three things listed above: an Italian, a German Catholic and a German who eventually became an Englishman (although friendship with More made Holbein subject to Catholic influence) are not icons at all; it is above all a conversation with a contemporary about modernity. They were written with an interval of twenty years - Mantegna did his thing in 1480, Grunewald - in 1506, Holbein - in 1522; all three works, each in its own way, involve the viewer in the action.

For Mantegna, including the viewer in the action was a necessity. As proof of the latter proposition, I will refer to the evolution of the image of Saint Sebastian. Mantegna addressed the plot three times; the image of an officer who opposed his state system contrary to army discipline, shot by his soldiers, seemed to him significant for his own time. He first wrote Sebastian in 1458: the saint is depicted against the background of ancient ruins, tied to the base of a destroyed triumphal arch (the theme of triumph appears even then). That is, the Roman statehood, as is clearly demonstrated, is flawed and destroyed - especially since the artist puts his signature in Greek.

The version of 1480 is different: Sebastian is still in the ancient city, tied to a Corinthian column, and archers appear in the picture. More precisely, the heads of the archers appear, painted at the level of our heads - the picture was in the altar of San Zeno in Verona and was strengthened so that the heads of the archers were flush with the heads of the spectators. The archers from the picture enter into a dialogue with us, one of the archers is turned in our direction and as if inviting us to take part in the shooting.

The final item of 1506 was the last painted by Mantegna - this picture remained in the workshop of the master when he died. There are no more accessories in this most powerful and passionate thing. The ancient city, the columns, and the archers also disappeared. What remains is the hopeless darkness and the body of Sebastian, twisted by effort (Michelangelo will repeat this effort in The Bound Slave, partly in Matthew) - and now we can rightfully assume that Sebastian is simply placed in front of us. It is we who contemplate his torment, and perhaps it is we who shoot at Sebastian. (Pay attention to the face of this last Sebastian: the martyr seems to sing. His mouth is open as if for a hymn, sung with all his might. Mantegna usually gave these singing lips to babies - when he painted the baby Jesus, he always made the child seem to sing .)

Returning to the frieze composition of the Triumphs, we can say that all these slaves actually pass by us, they are our height and defile past us: look - and decide whether you like such a procession.

Mantegna is an artist of unpleasant truth. He is like a dry, pedantic doctor who is so fascinated by science that he believes that even knowledge of a fatal illness will help the patient. His remedy is dry, harsh truth; no sentimentality, no condescension: say what you must, consistently and ruthlessly.

The intonation is always even, Mantegna never raises his voice, he speaks with stubborn and even monotonous force, but not loudly. There are no bright colors in the picture, no ecstatic gestures of the characters, no distorted faces - but, despite the balanced tone, a general atmosphere of exorbitant exertion is created. Why does this tension exist in the picture? Compressed lips, concentrated glances, frowning foreheads, gloomy coloring, ruthlessly precise lines of the drawing - all this makes us experience catharsis in those scenes where, it would seem, nothing affected is happening. Here is the scene of the blessing of the baby Jesus by the elder Simeon the God-Receiver; The Candlemas is an extremely blissful and even touching scene. Mantegna, dryly retelling the circumstances of the meeting of the holy family with Simeon, makes this scene tragic. The artist depicts the baby swaddled as an Egyptian mummy is swaddled, the baby's diapers resemble a shroud. Jesus appears as if before the position in the tomb, as if before us is a rehearsal of burial, and not at all the joy of entering into life. The face of Joseph, the husband of Mary, is striking. Joseph looks from the depths of the picture sternly and even with hostility, his lips compressed forever will not let out a single word, his eyes look from under his brows with unrelenting anger. Who is he angry with?

Mantegna in the last years of his life was engaged in something that could be compared with the "splitting of the atom" - he showed the inconsistency of the original eidos, the lack of integrity in the object that casts a shadow.

It is essential to include in the analysis of the Triumphs a modern book by Mantegna, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilus by Francesco Colonna, a priest and preacher who at that time played a role similar to that of Savonarola, if we bear in mind the degree of influence on minds. Hypnerotomachia Polyphilus is a book about the journey through a dream within a dream, a completely Platonic sequence of disincarnation. Polyphilus makes his travels in a dream, acquiring a different reality, more authentic than the one he touches. Mantegna was a faithful reader of the Column - in his later paintings there are direct quotes: rocks destroyed by time to the appearance of monsters. And the fact that our consciousness is a journey in the world of shadows, that is, in a dream that is dreaming, and the dream itself is civilization - all this is said very consistently.

What is curious here is this: the concept of “shadow” for ancient and for Christian perception is not identical. The shadow for Plato and the shadow for Thomas Aquinas have very different meanings. The nature of the shadow is interpreted in iconography as an evil inclination - and there is no double reading here. The iconography and painting of the Renaissance before Piero della Francesca does not know the shadow at all: to paint a saint in the shade or with a face changed by the play of chiaroscuro is nonsense. For example, in Dante's poem "the world of shadows" is not the world of meanings - the meaning is a bright light. Dante, who constantly talks about the topics of Platonic dialogues, imagines the ideal as an even radiance - and his guide Virgil (the ancient sage, to whom meaning is revealed in the shadows) cannot enter the world of light.

Mantegna, who was a Neo-Platonist, that is, he matched the Christian idea of ​​the first paradigm with the Platonic teaching, came up with a strange answer to this. He painted three-dimensional sculptures woven with chiaroscuro and casting shadows - now we see how things work in a cave, how a shadow is formed. Since now the object that casts the shadow is clearly visible to us, we can notice that the idea (shadow) and the entity that sends the idea (the procession in this case) are not identical at all.

The procession that casts a shadow is contradictory and vain; in a triumphal procession, the victim and the conqueror, the master and the slave, the captive and the master are intertwined into a single whole. It is paradoxical that the shadow cast by these figures on the wall of the cave will be common. Plato forgot to write about this - more precisely, the indivisibility of the eidos does not allow us to assume that something is not right inside the sending itself. Plato was a poet, he spoke the word better than most playwrights, but when he wrote about the "procession and triumph", he did not consider it necessary to see a dirty trick in the image. But the shadow (idea) is formed from the conjugation of the bodies of the master and the slave - that's the horror. The figures of enemies can have a common shadow - and, accordingly, our consciousness will feed on a common idea. But the root cause - that which cast this shadow, that which created our consciousness - is contradictory. Civilization - and history; knowledge - and faith; Mantegna wrote precisely about this contradiction. It is a great work of neo-Platonism, as it should, I believe, be read. This is exactly how, I think, the picture was interpreted by Colonna, although one can only guess on this score. Today, looking at the "Triumphs" of Mantegna, try to compare the greatness of the state discourse with the fragility of the individual consciousness; this is what Pushkin once did in The Bronze Horseman. When we are fascinated by an abstract state idea and your mind is at the mercy of shadows, try to turn your face to the entrance to the cave and see what exactly casts this magical shadow.

photo: BRIDGEMAN/FOTODOM; THE ROYL COLLECTION, HAMPTON COURT PALACE, LONDON, UK