Mantegna’s Revenge

Nicholas Penny

• Mantegna by Ronald Lightbown
  Phaidon/Christie’s, 512 pp, £60.00, July 1986, ISBN 0 7148 8031 0
• The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered edited by Massimo Giacometti, translated by Paul Holberton
  Muller, Blond and White, 271 pp, £40.00, September 1986, ISBN 0 584 11140 1

There never has been a great painter more inclined than Mantegna to lavish skill and thought on minute particulars, and even if this is less clear than it might be from the plates in Ronald Lightbown’s massive monograph, Lightbown himself has a very keen eye for the subordinate, often tiny things which the artist painted so well, and has industriously inquired into what exactly they were, and also into what they meant. There is, for instance, the glass oil-lamp, painted as if it was hanging above, and in front of, the throne of the Virgin in Mantegna’s great altarpiece in the Basilica of San Zeno in Verona, which is of a type invented in Venice, with a gold mount decorated with ‘sunk rosettes and sex-foils’, set with sapphires, rubies and pearls. It also has an ostrich egg hanging above it – an arrangement to be observed in other paintings of the period.