CHAPTER III.

THE CAMERA DEGLI SPOSI, A.D. 1470-1474.

Recent research has brought to light a series of valuable letters between the Gonzagas and Mantegna, which tell us little indeed about his existing works, but much that is of the deepest interest concerning his private life, and especially his relations with Lodovico and his family.

The Marquis had kept his word and proved himself a true friend and generous patron to the Paduan artist. _Carissmé noster_, _dilecte noster_, are the terms in which he always addresses him, and the thoughtful consideration and patience with which he treated Andrea in what must frequently have been very trying circumstances, are beyond all praise.

The first letter of the series is a complaint which the painter, writing from Goïto, addresses to Lodovico, saying that his stipend is irregularly paid, a wrong which the Marquis promptly redressed. Three years later we find him in the same liberal spirit advancing one hundred ducats which Mantegna begged in order to decorate and improve his house in Mantua.

There our painter spent the winter with his wife and three children—_tutto la mia brigatela_ he calls them in a letter to the Marquis—and each year, when the summer heats returned, he moved to a country-house at Buscoldo, where he afterwards received a grant of land from his patron.

In 1466 he paid a visit to Florence, where he had at least one friend in the learned Abbot of Fiesole, and a letter from Giovanni Aldobrandini, an agent of Lodovico, describes the great respect with which he was received, and the admiration excited by his varied accomplishments. “Not only in painting but in other ways he showed remarkable knowledge and most excellent understanding” is Aldobrandini’s testimony, and we learn from other sources that he took much pleasure in poetry, and even wrote verses himself. A sonnet of his composition addressed to a lady whose name is unknown, and written in the fashionable Platonic style of the day, has been discovered in the Mantuan archives and is given by Moschini. As a collector of antiquities he had acquired considerable reputation, and in 1472 we find the young Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, then at Bologna, begging his father that Mantegna may be sent to him that he may have the pleasure of showing him his cameos, bronzes, and other antiques.

Unfortunately the culture and refined taste which made Mantegna so agreeable a companion were accompanied by an irritable temper, and a readiness to take offence, which rendered him the reverse of a pleasant neighbour. The most trifling contradictions were sufficient to excite furious outbursts of anger on his part, and his letters to Lodovico are full of the pettiest grievances. The Marquis, it must be said, treated him with the utmost forbearance, and spared no pains to inquire into the grounds of his complaints, however small. On one occasion he implores Lodovico to punish a tailor who has spoilt a piece of his cloth, on another he has quarrelled with a gardener and his wife who live in the same street, and complains that neither he nor his wife can leave the house without being attacked by insulting words. More serious was the lawsuit in which he found himself involved with the engraver, Zoan Andrea, whom he suspected of purloining his plates, and to whom he administered a sound thrashing. Upon this Zoan Andrea had recourse to legal measures, in which Mantegna seems to have fared badly, since he was again compelled to seek the help of his powerful patron.

But of all Andrea’s quarrels, that which excited his greatest wrath was his breach with his Buscoldo neighbour, Francesco Aliprandi, whom he publicly accused of stealing five hundred quinces from a tree which grew in his garden. There is a singular combination of the pathetic and ludicrous in Mantegna’s description of the beauty of his fruit tree, with its branches so heavily laden that they touched the ground. Each day he looked upon it with fresh delight, until one September morning he found all the quinces gone, and the tree stripped and bare. His anger knew no bounds, and he did not hesitate to charge his nearest neighbours, the Aliprandi, who he was convinced bore him secret ill-will with the theft. Upon this Francesco Aliprandi, who seems to have been a citizen of good birth, denied the charge indignantly, saying that during the two hundred years his family had lived in Mantua, they had never been insulted by so vile an epithet as that of thief, and complaining of Mantegna’s disagreeable character as the real cause of all this disturbance. “No one,” Aliprandi continues, “can live near him in peace, and at the present moment he is engaged in lawsuits with no less than five of his neighbours.” Even the Marquis was forced to admit this time that Andrea was in the wrong, and, after carefully investigating the case, arrived at the conclusion that the quinces had been stolen by some unknown thief.

This ruggedness of disposition and exaggerated susceptibility which, by attaching excessive importance to the trifling cares of daily life, proved a constant torment to Mantegna and those around him, remind us curiously of Michelangelo, whom in more ways than one our master resembled.

Like the great Florentine in this also, he never stooped to flattery or servile expressions in addressing his patron. On the contrary, there is from the first an independent spirit and proud consciousness of his own merit which never deserts him, and he tells the Marquis repeatedly that his coming to Mantua was a great favour on his part, and that no other prince in Italy has so industrious an artist in his service.

The boast may not have sounded well in Mantegna’s lips, but it was a true one. His activity was indefatigable, and whether he painted in chapels and palaces, or made studies for tapestry or designs from the turkey-cocks and hens which strutted in the court poultry-yard, his time and powers were unreservedly placed at Lodovico’s disposal. What we have to regret is that so little of all his splendid work is left, although when we consider the subsequent history of Mantua, it is rather to be wondered that anything has been saved from the general wreck.

In 1630, little more than a hundred years after Mantegna’s time, the city was besieged during three months by the Imperialists, and ultimately taken and sacked for three whole days. In 1797 it was again twice besieged and bombarded by the French and Austrians, and during the wars of the present century the ducal palace has been alternately occupied by French and German soldiers. This once sumptuous pile is now the dreariest and most desolate of palaces. The little life that still lingers in the old town clusters round the market-place on the Piazza delle Erbe, and grass grows on the deserted square which was once the centre of “Mantova la Gloriosa.”

[Illustration: MEETING OF LODOVICO GONZAGA AND HIS SON, THE CARDINAL FRANCESCO. BY MANTEGNA.

_In the Camera degli Sposi, at Mantua._]

We pass through endless suites of spacious halls paved with marble and adorned with decaying frescoes and other remnants of faded splendour, till we reach the older part of the palace known in the days of the Gonzagas as the Castello di Corte. From its windows we look down on the sleepy waters of the vast lagoon, which seems to divide Mantua from the outer world, and over miles of swampy marshes, through which “smooth-sliding Mincius” winds its way.

Here the Gonzagas hold their splendid court, here the banqueting-halls where they feasted, the ball-rooms—the scenes of their revels and masquerades—the suite of tiny apartments expressly built for the use of the dwarfs, the courtyards where the dogs were kept, are still shown. Here Mantegna painted, and here the walls of a room, now used to contain the archives, were entirely covered with frescoes by himself.

This was the famous Camera degli Sposi, on which Andrea was engaged between 1470 and 1474, and where he represented Lodovico Gonzaga and his wife, Barbara of Brandenburg, surrounded by the different members of their family.

All the frescoes have been much damaged, and those on two of the walls completely obliterated; but the groups which remain and the decorations of the ceiling are of the highest interest, and, if we except the Hampton Court Triumphs, form the most important series that we have from Mantegna’s hand.

On the east wall above the mantel-piece is the central group. Lodovico and his wife, clad in rich brocaded robes, are seated in a garden surrounded by their children, and dwarfs in the act of receiving a messenger, who hands the Marquis a letter. Neither Lodovico nor any of his family seem to have been remarkable for personal beauty, and Mantegna has not made any attempt to embellish them. He paints them exactly as they were, in the stiff costumes of the day. Barbara wears the same veiled horn-shaped head-dress as in Andrea’s portrait-engraving in the British Museum; the children and courtiers are in short jackets and tight-fitting caps. Nothing is omitted that could complete the picture, which is like a page torn out of the court life of those times; a favourite greyhound lies asleep under Lodovico’s chair, and several dwarfs positively repulsive in their ugliness are introduced. They formed, we know, an important part of the household, since the Marquis kept a particular race, bred at Mantua, and reserved a whole wing of his palace, with staircases, halls, and bedrooms adapted to their stature, for their exclusive use.

Beyond the fine figure of the courtier on the right, evidently the painter’s own portrait, we have another compartment where the Marquis stands at the head of the stairs welcoming his guests, or, as Selvatico suggests, opening his arms to his son Federico, who had been in disgrace for refusing to consent to a marriage which Lodovico had arranged for him. This subject is much damaged, but on the entrance-wall is another group, the best preserved of the three, in which the Marquis meets his younger son, the boy-cardinal Francesco, on his return from Rome. The composition is stiff and the dresses awkward, but nothing can surpass the life-like character of the heads, whether we fix our eyes on the baby-faces and demure air of the children who advance to welcome their brother, or on the vigorous profiles of Lodovico and his courtiers. A tame lion crouches at the feet of the Marquis, and a view of hills and classical temples, intended to represent Rome, fills in the background. On the opposite side of the doorway the servants and pages in attendance are introduced holding their master’s horse, and several dogs in leash, all admirably drawn; while above the door itself a charming group of seven winged boys, in every possible attitude, support a tablet with the following inscription:—

Ill Lodovico II. M.M. Principi optimo ac Fide invictissimo Et Ill Barbaræ eius Conjugi Mulierum Glor Incomparabili Suus Andreas Mantinia Patavus opus hoc tenue Ad eorum Decus absolvit. Ann. MCCCCLXXIIII.

The grace and freshness of these boy-angels form a striking contrast to the stiff figures on the walls, and both here and in the decorations of the ceiling our painter, released from the obligations of portraiture, allowed his fancy free play. Medallions of the Cæsars wreathed in laurel, grisaille scenes from the myths of Hercules and Antæus, Orpheus, Apollo, and the Tritons, occupy the vaulting of the ceiling; while in the centre a circular opening is painted to represent a blue sky, across which white clouds are floating by, as we see in actual reality in the Pantheon of Rome. Round this open space runs a balustrade, upon which a peacock is perched and a basket of fruit rests. Two women, a girl with a jewelled head-dress and a negress, look down from above with laughing faces, while a band of winged boys play on the edge of the stone-work.

These are the famous figures, _che scortano di sotto in sù_, which Vasari says excited general admiration when Mantegna first painted them in the Castle of Mantua.

Instead of treating the ceiling in the usual fashion, as another flat surface on a level with the spectator’s eye, he endeavoured to represent the figures he painted there as seen from below, and in reality looking down over the balustrade. The optical illusion is effected in a masterly way, and the playful boys, who push their heads through the open stone-work of the parapet or balance themselves on its edge, are admirably foreshortened.

Curiously enough, this new principle of ceiling decoration, which in Corregio’s days was to become universal, and which Mantegna here attempted for the first time, was employed at almost the same moment by another painter, Melozzo da Forli, in his fresco of the “Glory of Heaven” in the tribune of the Church of the SS. Apostoli at Rome. Whether the two masters had ever been brought into personal contact we do not learn, but we know that Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, in his rhyming chronicle, gives Mantegna’s perspective the highest praise, and we may infer from this that the great Lombard’s influence had penetrated far enough south to reach the Umbrian artists.

The frescoes of the Camera degli Sposi were finished in 1474, and ten years later it is recorded that Mantegna painted in another part of the palace, known as the Scalcheria; but a ruined ceiling, with the same circular opening and sportive Loves, is all that is left of his work there.

Traces of his hand are also visible in another hall in some of the groups of a large, much-injured fresco, where the first Gonzaga is represented taking the oath as _Capitano del popolo_, and more especially in the children holding a tablet which once bore a now-effaced inscription.

All else has perished. The lapse of time and the more cruel ravages of man have swept away whatever other paintings once adorned these walls, and the precious fragments of the Camera degli Sposi are absolutely the only works of Mantegna that are still to be seen in this his adopted city, where he spent well-nigh fifty years of his life.

[Illustration]