CHAPTER V.

THE TRIUMPHS OF JULIUS CÆSAR: DRAWINGS, 1490-1500.

Mantegna, as we have already mentioned, returned to Mantua in the summer of 1490, and during the rest of that year and the whole of the following one he devoted himself without interruption to his “Triumphs,” which he finally completed in February, 1492.

This famous series consists of nine pieces of fine twilled linen, upon which Andrea painted in tempera the triumphal procession of Julius Cæsar on his way to the Capitol, after the Conquest of Gaul. The whole formed a frieze eighty feet long, and the separate compartments, each nine feet high, were originally divided by pilasters adorned with warlike ornaments.

In the first piece, the trumpeters marching at the head of the procession open the pageant with a burst of warlike music, closely followed by standard-bearers carrying pictures of Cæsar’s victories, smoking censers, and a large bust of Roma Victrix. In the second, the gods of the captive cities are borne in chariots, a colossal Jupiter and Juno foremost, then a fine Cybele, and after these come trophies of armour, battering-rams, and other warlike implements, lifted high on men’s shoulders. The costlier part of the spoil follows in the third and fourth compartments, where strong men bend under the weight of vases filled with gold and treasures, and white heifers garlanded with flowers ready for sacrifice, are led by veiled priests and beautiful fair-haired youths in their white tunics and red girdles. In the fifth picture another band of trumpeters heralds the next division, and four large elephants, hung with gold chains and draperies, bear on their backs baskets of flowers and young children, who fan the flames of lighted candelabra. More trophies follow in the sixth compartment; the armour of captive princes is borne aloft on poles, and so great is its weight that one old soldier, exhausted by the load he bears, sits down to recover breath. In the next picture we reach the most interesting part of the procession—a train of captives who advance with slow and sorrowful steps, but not without an air of noble fortitude on their faces as they meet the jeers of the populace. Men and women of all ages are among them, proud chiefs, matrons of royal blood, sweet-faced maidens, a young bride with the myrtle wreath on her fair brow and a coral necklace round her throat. Close to her we see a mother bearing her youngest born in her arms and leading a boy by the hand, who cries to be taken up, while the old grandmother bends down to soothe him with caresses.

In the eighth picture, immediately following this touching group, come the jesters and hideous buffoons, who mock the prisoners with their laughter and ape-like grimaces, and a troop of musicians singing and dancing to the sound of timbrels. After these we have another company of _signiferi_, this time bearing the eagles of the victorious legions and the she-wolf of Rome. Their faces are turned backwards, and their eager, expectant gaze prepare us for the coming of the conqueror, who appears in the last picture seated on a richly sculptured biga with sceptre and palm in his hand, and a laurel crown, which a winged Victory is in the act of placing on his brow. At his feet children shout for joy, and wave laurel boughs in his path; the multitude press round his chariot wheels and a gaily-clad youth, with eager enthusiasm in his upturned gaze, lifts aloft a banner bearing Cæsar’s well-known motto, _Veni, vidi, vici_, to meet the victor’s eyes.

This subject now forms the last of the series but Mantegna’s original scheme included a tenth picture which he afterwards abandoned, probably because the hall for which the “Triumphs” were intended was not large enough to contain more than nine.

An engraving, however, remains in which a body of Roman citizens, followed by the first ranks of the advancing legions, are represented marching in the conqueror’s progress; and the great procession, after reaching its culminating point, is thus brought to a tranquil close. Goethe, who knew the “Triumphs,” not indeed in the original, but from Andreani’s engravings, and who wrote a masterly criticism on the series, was the first to feel the need of a final scene to satisfy the eye, and to point out that this must have been the artist’s original design.

Such, then, are the principal parts of this magnificent work, in which the love of antiquity, which was the ruling power of Mantegna’s genius, found its highest expression. It was a sentiment common to many artists in this age of revived learning, but while other men, like Botticelli or Piero della Francesca, saw pagan themes through the colouring of their own medieval fancies, he alone entered thoroughly into the true spirit of ancient art.

A glance at the “Triumphs” is sufficient to show us how profoundly Mantegna had studied classical authors and how much freedom he had acquired in dealing with his subject.

[Illustration: PART OF THE TRIUMPHS OF JULIUS CÆSAR. BY MANTEGNA.

_At Hampton Court._]

Those ancient Romans are no strangers to him; he has lived among them and mingled with them as freely as with men of his own day, the folds of their draperies, their very gait and countenance are all familiar to him. The same intimate knowledge of Roman times reveals itself in a hundred details; in the temples and viaducts of the background, in the mythological reliefs which adorn chariots, shields and breast-plates, in tablets bearing Latin inscriptions, in the triumphal arch under which Cæsar passes as he goes on his way. And here we may notice that Andrea, in one of the reliefs of this arch, has again introduced the “Twins” of Monte Cavallo, which during his visit to Rome he had doubtless seen with his own eyes in their time-honoured place on the Quirinal hill.

In the execution of the “Triumphs” we observe the same high degree of finish, as in all his later work; the drapery hangs in the small folds of Greek sculpture, but without stiffness or formality; while the light and transparent colouring is admirably adapted in its softly-shaded tints to the general character of the subject. Evidently in this it was Mantegna’s intention to imitate as closely as possible the style of ancient painting. Unfortunately most of the pictures have suffered from repainting, and at the present day it needs a very minute examination to appreciate the delicacy of the fragments that have been left untouched.

Both in the plastic tendency of form and in the principles of perspective which Mantegna has here successfully applied, we see the result of his earlier studies, modified and restrained by the experience of the thirty years which had passed since the days when he painted the Eremitani frescoes. Nothing can surpass the manner in which the whole of the splendid pageantry of the “Triumphs” is subdued and governed by the laws of composition, till every figure moves in perfect rhythm and harmony of line. We have only to look at the episode of the “Triumphs” by Rubens (in the National Gallery) to see how the subject, released from the severe restraint of Mantegna’s art, could degenerate into a Bacchanalian feast of wild beasts, revellers, and dancing women. But for all its sculptured tendencies and likenesses to a classic frieze, this great series is no procession of marble statues, cold and rigid in their antique beauty. The forms which pass before us in the long array are animated with life and warmth, their faces glow with the fire of human passion in all its endless varieties. Tender and youthful, or worn by age and care, exultant with the joy of victory, or bowed down to earth by a cruel fate, they are men and women like ourselves, and appeal to us by the instincts of a common humanity. In the well-known words of Goethe, “The study of the antique supplies form, nature gives movement and the last touch of life.”

For more than a century the “Triumphs” of Mantegna remained in the hall of the palace for which they had been intended, and were seen there both by Vasari and the historian Mario Equicola. On festive occasions they were sometimes moved to the Castello di Corte, and in Andrea’s lifetime they were used as stage decorations when the comedies of Plautus and Terence were performed at the Court of Mantua.

Several separate episodes of the “Triumphs” were engraved by Mantegna himself, and the complete series became generally known by the publication of the large wood-cuts by Andrea Andreani at the close of the sixteenth century.

In 1628, a short time before the sack of Mantua, the pictures themselves were sold to Charles I., with several other masterpieces of the Gonzaga collection. After that monarch’s death on the scaffold they were again sold by the Parliament, but Cromwell bought them for £1,000.[3] Charles II. placed them in the palace at Hampton Court. There this precious series still remains, irreparably injured by frequent removal and repainting, but still in beauty and completeness both of design and execution one of the most remarkable works of the Italian Renaissance.

The exact date of the completion of the “Triumphs” is fixed by a fresh grant of land which Francesco bestowed upon Mantegna in February, 1492, with an express mention of the great work which he had at length brought to a happy termination. “If the Marquis had loved him before, he loved him still more now,” says Vasari, and in reality Andrea seemed to have attained the highest pitch of honour and good fortune. For once his affairs were prosperous. In 1492 he sold his small property at Padua, and two years later furnished his own beautiful house in the quarter of St. Sebastian. At the same time he came to a final settlement with his Buscoldo creditors and exchanged land with his old enemy Aliprandi. His son, Lodovico, obtained a good appointment as overseer and agent to the Marquis at Cavriana, while Francesco, who was the least satisfactory of the two and frequently caused Andrea anxiety, embraced the artist’s profession and became his father’s assistant. Lastly, his only daughter, Taddea, was married, on the 4th of July, 1499, with two hundred and sixty ducats as her dowry, to Viano Vianesi, whom he styles “uomo prudente” in his letters.

Besides these children by marriage Andrea had one other son, Gian’ Andrea by name, born in his old age after the death of his wife Niccolosia, and whom in his will of 1504 he mentions as being still a child.

His improved circumstances seem to have softened his temper, and the only complaint we find in his letters to the Marquis at this time is that the stones which he had prepared for building in his yard are stolen in broad daylight, one of the thieves whom his son had caught in the act of carrying away his spoil under his mantle being an officer of Francesco’s household.

We hear occasionally of his suffering from attacks of illness, but as a painter his powers were at their best, and many of his finest works belong to the period between his return from Rome and the close of the fifteenth century.

Among classical subjects are the two beautiful pictures now in the Louvre, originally executed for the Marchioness Isabella’s “studio of the grotto,” a room which Andrea, Perugino, and Costa were all employed to decorate, and which became a complete museum of both antique and Renaissance art. Andrea painted several panels for this apartment at Isabella’s command, some we are told in imitation of bronze-reliefs, and one in which the prophet Jonah, is represented in the act of being cast into the sea; but the “Wisdom Victorious over the Vices” and the “Parnassus,” both in the Louvre, are the only works of the series which have come down to posterity. Both closely resemble the “Triumphs” in style of modelling and in delicacy of finish. One is an allegorical composition, such as Botticelli might have painted, in which Minerva and Diana, led by Wisdom bearing a torch, are driving out a tribe of Vices under the forms of centaurs and satyrs, while Justice, Force, and Temperance hover in the air, about to return to earth.

The form of the avenging goddesses is essentially classic in type, and the trees of the background show that loving care in each leaf which entitles Mantegna to a foremost place among the foliage painters of the age. The other, perhaps the most poetic of all Andrea’s conceptions, brings before us a pleasant landscape where the Muses dance hand in hand to the music of Apollo’s lyre, while Mercury leans on the neck of Pegasus hard by, and Mars and Venus pause from their embraces to listen to the enchanted sound. Brighter tints than Andrea generally employs enliven the scene, and in the light fluttering drapery and measured stop of the dancing nine there is a grace and charm of movement which no contemporary painter ever surpassed.

These groups of dancing nymphs became a favourite motive with Mantegna, and form the subject of one of his engravings as well as of a finished drawing, exceedingly graceful and charming in design, now at Munich. Classical subjects at this time occupied a great part of his thoughts, and some of his finest engravings, the “Battle of the Sea-Gods,” “Hercules and Antæus,” and the “Bacchanalia,” belong to this period. Closely related to these are the beautiful drawings of the British Museum to which Mr. Comyns Carr recently called attention, the “Mars, Diana and Venus,” which in ideal beauty of form yields to none of Andrea’s designs, and the long frieze-shaped composition of “Calumny,” after the pattern of Apelles’s last picture, which these artists of the early Renaissance delighted to recall.

Several other precious drawings by Mantegna belong the Christ Church collection, Oxford. Chief among them is the original composition for his celebrated engraving of the “Entombment,” and a fine example of another of his favourite subjects, “Hercules killing the Lion,” inscribed _Divo Herculi invicto_. Many more are in the hands of private collectors, and a whole volume containing twenty-six sheets of mythological subjects was exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, by Miss Hannah de Rothschild (now Lady Rosebery).

Among the other drawings of remarkable merit now scattered over Europe, we will only mention the “Judgment of Solomon” in the Louvre, the “Sagrifizio,” which forms the chief ornament of the Verona Museum, and the well-known “Judith” of the Uffizi (see page 37), which once belonged to Vasari, and bears the date of February, 1491.

It was not in the nature of Mantegna’s art to cast off a hasty sketch, or to leave to the world faces of rare loveliness drawn in a few pencil strokes as it were at random on the paper. Whether he was engaged on the cartoon of an altar-piece, or on a simple pattern of a cup or fountain, all he achieved was marked by the same patient, untiring labour, the same minute care, above all by the same feeling for beauty in every detail. Many of us remember that exquisite design for a chalice which attracted general attention in one of our last winter exhibitions. It is true the perspective of the Cup was faulty, but this defect was scarcely noticed in the beauty of the work, with which every part of the chalice was covered. Scenes from the life of Christ, cherub heads and elaborate scroll work adorned the border of the Cup. Apostles and prophets were figured on its base, while the stem was studded with rows of lovely babies and angel heads, executed with a grace and delicacy which rendered the whole a perfect marvel of decorative art. And so it is with his larger drawings, whether classical or religious in subject. Each hair in the head of his “Judith” is distinctly drawn, there is the same attention to form in the folds of her falling drapery, or, to take another instance—the fair faces of the youth and maiden in the procession of the _Sagrifizio_. Both are designs in the best spirit of classical art, and remind us of the finest Greek sculpture.

We have said that pagan themes occupied much of Mantegna’s imagination during the years immediately following the conclusion of the “Triumphs,” but the three large altar-pieces which also belong to this period must not be passed over. In the first place we have the “Madonna della Vittoria,” now in the Louvre, perhaps the noblest of all his religious pictures. This altar-piece was painted by order of the Marquis Francesco to commemorate his pretended victory at Fornovo, where he had encountered the French, but, far from being victorious, had lost the greater part of his army, and narrowly escaped with his life. A curious circumstance characteristic of the manners of the times is connected with this painting.

[Illustration: THE MADONNA DELLA VITTORIA. BY MANTEGNA.

_In the Louvre, Paris._]

A Jew of Villafranca, Daniele Norsa by name, in the year 1495 bought a house in Mantua which had a Madonna painted over the door, and fearing any accidental misfortune to the picture might excite popular displeasure, prudently obtained leave from the bishop to remove the sacred image. Even this step was turned to his prejudice, and on Ascension Day his house was attacked by the mob and narrowly escaped destruction. The Jew appealed to the Marquis for protection, and ultimately his case was brought before a tribunal, which condemned him, by way of reparation for the supposed insult to the Virgin, to place a new picture painted by Mantegna in one of the Mantuan churches. In the meantime the battle of Fornovo took place, and Francesco, who in the hour of danger had vowed to erect a church in Mantua to the Virgin, resolved to gratify popular feeling and give greater effect to the fulfilment of his vow by placing the building on the spot where the Madonna’s honour had been slighted. Accordingly he bought Norsa’s house, and on the anniversary of the battle, July 6th, 1496, the votive Madonna painted by Mantegna for the occasion was placed above the high altar of the newly erected church with great popular rejoicing. Three hundred years afterwards the French carried off this picture, which was originally intended to celebrate the victory over their nation, in triumph to Paris, where it still remains.

Few perhaps of Andrea’s larger works are as generally and deservedly popular. The mild Virgin, in blue hood and mantle, sitting under her leafy bower hung with fruit and coral and gay with twittering birds, is familiar to all visitors to the Louvre. Both mother and child stretch out their hands in blessing towards the kneeling Marquis, whose life-like portrait excited the universal admiration of contemporaries. Opposite him, the venerable form of St. Elizabeth is seen kneeling at the side of the young St. John, who stands on the carved pedestal of the Virgin’s throne, and in the background are the patron saints of Mantua, Andrew and Longinus. More beautiful than either of these are the two warrior saints, Michael and George, who stand in full armour on either side, holding the hem of the Virgin’s mantle, and who, with their noble features, manly forms, and flowing masses of fair locks, are perfect types of Christian chivalry—in other words, of that union of strength and tenderness which is held to constitute the heroic character.

The “Virgin” of the National Gallery, long in the possession of different Milanese families, bears a close resemblance, both in style and execution, to the “Madonna della Vittoria,” and was probably painted about the same time. Here the Virgin is seated under a red baldacchino between St. Mary Magdalen and the Baptist, who stand erect against a background of dark green orange-trees and silver-clouded sky. The face of the Magdalen is lighted with the glad enthusiasm of her love, and in the foliage we notice the same careful finish as in the bowers of the “Parnassus” and in the leaf-painting of all Mantegna’s works.

To the same period and class of picture belongs the “Glorified Madonna” which Andrea painted for the monks of Santa Maria in Organo of Verona, now in the Casa Trivulzi at Milan. Here the Madonna is enthroned on the clouds, with four life-sized saints; a landscape of tall lemon-trees is behind her. A troop of singing boy-angels hover in the air, after the fashion of the Camera degli Sposi frescoes, and one bears a scroll with the inscription:—

“A Mantinia p. an. gracie 1497, 15 Augusti.”

[Illustration: VIRGIN AND CHILD, WITH ST. JOHN AND THE MAGDALEN. BY MANTEGNA.

_In the National Gallery, London._]

The small blue-mantled “Madonna” of Bergamo, and a good portrait of a Gonzaga in the same collection, may have been painted towards the close of the century, to which period the engravings of the “Triumphs” and several other subjects are assigned. Finally, among the labours which occupied the last months of 1499, was the commission to design a monument of Virgil for the chief square of Mantua. The plan originated with the Marchioness Isabella, who consulted the learned Latinists, Pontanus and Vergerius, at Naples, as to the best mode of carrying her scheme into effect. They suggested Mantegna as the natural person to furnish a design for the monument, and he entered warmly into a project so well suited to the spirit of the age. We can hardly imagine a commission more congenial to a painter so imbued with Latin traditions as Mantegna, and the statue which he designed was worthy of the occasion, as the drawing recently discovered in the collection of M. His de la Salle abundantly proves. Virgil is represented crowned with laurel and holding the Æneid in his hands, while winged boys on the pedestal at his feet support a tablet with the words:—

“P. Vergilii Maronis a æternæ sui memoriæ imago.”

Unfortunately, Andrea never had the satisfaction of seeing this design executed in bronze or marble. Whether Francesco’s treasures were expended in wars, or whether Isabella’s intention was only a caprice of the moment, the scheme was abandoned, and Mantua remained without a monument of her greatest son.

[Illustration]