| The Crucifixion | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Andrea Mantegna |
| Year | 1457–1459 |
| Medium | tempera on panel |
| Dimensions | 67 cm× 93 cm(26 in× 37 in) |
| Location | The Louvre, Paris |
The Crucifixion is a panel in the central part of the predella (see image below) of a large altarpiece painted by Andrea Mantegna between 1457 and 1459 for the high altar of San Zeno, Verona (Italy). It was commissioned by Gregorio Correr, the abbot of that monastery.
The Crucifixion was brought to the Louvre in 1798 and put on exhibition immediately. In 1806 two of the predella panels (the Mount of Olives and the Resurrection) were sent to the museum of Tours. In 1815 the central panel and the two wings were taken back to Italy and exhibited in the city museum at Verona. After 1918, they were returned to the church of San Zeno, where they still remain - though they are not very easy to see. The commission of 1815 charged with reclaiming the works of art taken from the Veneto left the predella panels in the possession of the Louvre and the museum of Tours. [1]
The Crucifixion was in the middle of the predella, exactly in the centre, as may be seen in the full altarpiece image below. Mantegna was striving after an effect of steep visual perspective such as he had already achieved in the Eremitani chapel at Padua. [2] The figures in the foreground, cut by the frame, increase the effect of recession; the vanishing lines of the ground are curved inwards and somehow contracted. The artist's feeling for nature is revealed by the minuteness with which he has represented every detail of the landscape. The accurate delineation of the Roman soldiers' equipment is evidence of an attitude to antiquity unknown in Florence at that period. [3] Florentine artists sought to understand and emulate the aesthetic quality of antique sculpture and architecture, but cared little for historical exactitude, which Mantegna on the other hand pursued with the passionate devotion of an archaeologist. In fact, the Veneto was from the 14th century onwards, the chief Italian centre for the traffic in anticaglie - Venetian towns owned cabinets d'antiquités long before these were found in Florence. [4]
Fra Angelico, OP was a Dominican friar and Italian painter of the Early Renaissance, described by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent". He earned his reputation primarily for the series of frescoes he made for his own friary, San Marco, in Florence, then worked in Rome and other cities. All his known work is of religious subjects.
Paolo Uccello, born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. Uccello used perspective to create a feeling of depth in his paintings. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano, which were wrongly entitled the Battle of Sant'Egidio of 1416 for a long period of time.
Jacopo Bellini was one of the founders of the Renaissance style of painting in Venice and northern Italy. His sons Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna, were also famous painters.
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini.
Domenico Veneziano was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance, active mostly in Perugia and Tuscany.
In art a predella is the lowest part of an altarpiece, sometimes forming a platform or step, and the painting or sculpture along it, at the bottom of an altarpiece, sometimes with a single much larger main scene above, but often, a polyptych or multipanel altarpiece. In late medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, where the main panel consisted of a scene with large figures, it was normal to include a predella below with a number of small-scale narrative paintings depicting events from the life of the dedicatee, whether the Life of Christ, the Life of the Virgin or a saint. Typically there would be three to five small scenes, in a horizontal format. Sometimes a single space shows different scenes in continuous representation.
BartolomeoMontagna was an Italian Renaissance painter who mainly worked in Vicenza. He also produced works in Venice, Verona, and Padua. He is most famous for his many Madonnas and his works are known for their soft figures and depiction of eccentric marble architecture. He is considered to be heavily influenced by Giovanni Bellini, in whose workshop he might have worked around 1470. Benedetto Montagna, a productive engraver, was his son and pupil and active until about 1540. He was mentioned in Vasari's Lives as a student of Andrea Mantegna but this is widely contested by art historians.
Carlo Crivelli was an Italian Renaissance painter of conservative Late Gothic decorative sensibility, who spent his early years in the Veneto, where he absorbed influences from the Vivarini, Squarcione, and Mantegna. He left the Veneto by 1458 and spent most of the remainder of his career in the March of Ancona, where he developed a distinctive personal style that contrasts with that of his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Bellini.
The Deposition, also known as the Pala Baglioni, Borghese Entombment or The Entombment, is an oil painting by the Italian High Renaissance painter Raphael. Signed and dated "Raphael. Urbinas. MDVII", the painting is in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. It is the central panel of a larger altarpiece commissioned by Atalanta Baglioni of Perugia in honor of her slain son, Grifonetto Baglioni. Like many works, it shares elements of the common subjects of the Deposition of Christ, the Lamentation of Christ, and the Entombment of Christ. The painting is on wood panel and measures 184 x 176 cm.
The decade of the 1450s in art involved many significant events, especially in sculpture.
The decade of the 1440s in art involved some significant events.
The San Zeno Altarpiece is a polyptych altarpiece by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna created around 1456–1459. It remains in situ in the Basilica di San Zeno, the main church of the Northern Italian city of Verona. Mantegna's style mixes Greco-Roman classical themes along with Christian subjects in this altarpiece. The central panel, along with the three paintings that comprise the predella, were taken in 1797 by the French. While the main, central scene was returned by the French to Verona in 1815, the three predella paintings in Verona today are copies, since the original ones remain in France at the Louvre (Crucifixion) and in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours. The paintings are made with tempera on panel; not oil as mistakenly identified in one source.
The Basilica di San Zeno is a minor basilica of Verona, northern Italy constructed between 967 and 1398 AD. Its fame rests partly on its Romanesque architecture and partly upon the tradition that its crypt was the place of the marriage of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It stands adjacent to a Benedictine abbey, both dedicated to St Zeno of Verona.
Biagio d’Antonio Tucci was an Italian Renaissance painter active in Florence, Faenza and Rome.
Francesco Bonsignori, also known as Francesco Monsignori, was an Italian painter and draughtsman, characterized by his excellence in religious subjects, portraits, architectural perspective and animals. He was born in Verona and died in Caldiero, a city near Verona. Bonsignori's style in early period was under the influence of his teacher Liberale da Verona. After becoming the portraitist and court artist to the Gonzaga family of Mantua in 1487, his style was influenced by Andrea Mantegna, who also worked for Francesco Gonzaga from the 1480s. They collaborated to execute several religious paintings, mainly with the theme of Madonna and Child. The attribution of theportrait of a Venetian Senator was debatable until the last century because of the similarity in techniques used by Bonsignori and his teacher Mantegna. During the phase of his career in Mantua, there is an undocumented period between 1495 and July 1506 with no official record regarding his activities by the court of Mantua. Bonsignori's late style was decisively influenced by Lorenzo Costa in terms of form and color. He produced his last monumental altarpiece the Adoration of the Blessed Osanna Andreasi in 1519 shortly before his death.
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The Pesaro Altarpiece is an oil-on-panel painting by the Italian artist Giovanni Bellini, dated to some time between 1471 and 1483. It is considered one of Bellini's first mature works, though there are doubts on its dating and on who commissioned it. The work's technique is not only an early use of oils but also of blue smalt, a by-product of the glass industry. It had already been used in the Low Countries in Bouts' 1455 The Entombment, but this marked smalt's first use in Italian art, twenty years before Leonardo da Vinci used it in Ludovico il Moro's apartments in Milan in 1492. Bellini also uses the more traditional lapis lazuli and azurite for other blues in the work.
Resurrection is a tempera on panel painting by Andrea Mantegna dating from 1457–59, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours.
