21

Mantegna and Icons

Adam Stead

Andrea Mantegnas complex painterly archaeology1 has long been a focus ofart historical discourse on fifteenth-century Italian painting. A mover inhumanist circles, Mantegna, perhaps more than any other Quattrocento painter,is largely regarded as the painter-archaeologist par excellence. His first majorproject, the frescoes (now destroyed) in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua, announce,already in the years around 1450, Mantegnas commitment to the classical pastas the basis for a modern art. Mantegnas almost academic interest in recreatingantique visual environments, both in style and content, grew steadily through-out his career, culminating in such works as the expansive series of the Tri-umphs of Caesar (1490s) or the small drawing of the Calumny of Apelles (ca.1500). The importance of classical statuary, and relief sculpture in particular, inthe formation of Mantegnas cool, sculptural and lapidary style is a common-place of Mantegna criticism, to such an extent that the painters pictorial worksare often regarded more or less as a translation of classical relief sculpture intoa painterly idiom.2 Fundamentally, this is an accurate picture of Mantegnaspainterly project. But this model of Mantegnas antiquarianism tends toobscure, if not exclude outright, other, no less significant strata in the dig sitethat was Mantegnas pictorial reformulation of the past. In this paper, I want tocomplicate Mantegnas already complex visual archaeology by introducinganother object-variable: the icon.

Mantegna is not usually regarded as having been especially influencedby icons. In this, he stands, at least in twentieth-century art historical discourse,in marked contrast to his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini, whose engagementwith icon traditions in Venice has been the subject of a substantial amount ofscholarship.3 No such study has been undertaken in Mantegnas case. Mantegnadid, nonetheless, figure large in Sixten Ringboms 1965 book on the rise of half-length narrative in fifteenth-century painting, with Mantegnas Presentation inthe Temple (1450s; Fig. 1) marking the first instance in which the half-lengthicon-type image was expanded into a half-length narrative scene.4 Ringbomswide-ranging and ground-breaking study was largely concerned with develop-mental history and, accordingly, mapped out the later Quattrocento trajectoryof Mantegnas invention in paintings of the Presentation and Circumcisionfrom the circle of Giovanni Bellini, who subjected Mantegnas new narrativeform (only tenuously established around the iconic core) to a process ofnaturalization through which the half-length narrative image gained in psycho-

22 Adam Stead

logical impact and plausibility.5 Remarkably, despite the title of his study,Ringbom spent little time articulating just which icons were subjected tonarrative expansion; icon, for Ringbom, was very much an image type, suchas the half-length Virgin and Child or the Man of Sorrows, rather than a groupof real icons in Italian and Northern European churches that was taken up andmodified in significant ways by fifteenth-century painters.Ringboms thesis, important as it is, represents only one facet of Mantegnasengagement with icons, and perhaps, to a certain extent, even distorts ourunderstanding of Mantegnas approach to religious painting. For, even after hisground-breaking discovery of half-length narrative painting, Mantegna contin-ued to produce unexpanded figural compositions centered on the individualfigures of the Virgin and Child (Figs. 2 and 3) or the adult Christ (Fig. 19).Mantegnas small-scale devotional works, in fact, outnumber his half-lengthnarrative compositions.6 Nor should such non-narrative paintings beregarded as retardataire or backwards-looking, simple paintings destined forprivate devotional contexts. Rather, these paintings, like Mantegnas half-lengthnarratives themselves, must be situated within the larger rethinking in thesecond half of the fifteenth century of the structure and nature of religiouspainting. Indeed, Mantegna by no means restricted himself to the half-lengthformat: full-length compositions centered on a central figure were, forMantegna, an equally crucial pictorial forum for rethinking the religious image.Half-length narrative, then, represents only one of several forms of engage-ment with the icon.

Mantegnas pictorial response to icons, I argue in this paper, was wide-ranging and is characterized not by one but rather by various strategies forreformulating traditional image types (the Virgin and Child, the Man ofSorrows). First, I make a case for Mantegnas knowledge of and engagementwith two enigmatic icons in his native Padua. I detail the range of resonancesthat these icons had in fifteenth-century Padua and consider the possibility andextent of Mantegnas involvement in the discourses surrounding these images.The next portion of the essay deals with Mantegnas visual (rather than verbal)response to the Paduan icons: what happens to these icons when they enterMantegnas painterly economy? A brief final section examines Mantegnastreatment of the Man of Sorrows, for it is around this theme that Mantegnasstrategies for investing religious painting with complex temporalities comes intoclearest focus.

Mantegna and Icons 23

Mantegna and Icons in Padua

To judge from the textual record, two venerable images of the Virgin and Childin Padua (Figs. 4 and 5) aroused a considerable amount of interest amonglearned commentators in the fifteenth century. The most ancient (in a modernart historical system of classification) of the two images is a much-damagedicon of the Virgin and Child in the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Giustina. Themedium-sized panel (88 x 53 cm) has been assigned a variety of dates, rangingfrom the twelfth century to the late thirteenth; the place of its manufacture,moreover, has been debated, with some scholars arguing for aConstantinopolitan provenance and others, with differing degrees of convic-tion, for the panels origins in Italy, perhaps in the Veneto.7 A recent technicalexamination of the Santa Giustina icon revealed that the poplar wood panel onwhich it is painted was made sometime between 1020 and 1170, making a dateearlier than the thirteenth century more likely.8

Stunning even in its highly fragmentary state, the image in SantaGiustina is remarkable for a number of reasons. The disposition of the Virginand Child, with the Child supported on the Virgins right rather than left arm,the so-called Dexiokratousa type, is unusual, a rarity vis--vis the more commonand diffused Hodegetria type, in which the Virgin cradles the Child in her leftarm while gesturing to him with her right.9 This distinction, important as it is,may be of interest only to the twenty-first-century art historian concerned withdrawing up recensions of various icon types. Certainly, in the later Middle Agesand up to the turn of the sixteenth century, the icons primary interest lay in itsmiraculous abilities andno less miraculousprovenance. The earliest knowntextual account of the Santa Giustina icon, in a series liturgical readings for thefeast of Saint Luke in an early fourteenth-century lectionary from SantaGiustina, details the translation of the icon, along with the relics of theEvangelist Luke, to Padua from the Church of the Holy Apostles inConstantinople.10 The iconoclast emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363), thelegend tells us, in his contempt for Christianity, ordered all Christian images inthe city of Constantinople burned. Cast into the Apostates great fire, the SantaGiustina icon jumped, miraculously, out of the fire and escaped, unaided,over water to safety. After three days of repentant fasting by the citizens ofConstantinople, the image fell from the sky into the arms of a particularlyfaithful Constantinopolitan woman. Finally, after spending the next fewcenturies in Constantinople, the icon was brought to Padua with Lukes bodyduring the eight-century iconoclastic controversy by a certain Urius, a Greekcustodian of the Church of the Apostles.

Thus, by the early fourteenth century at the latest, the Santa Giustina

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icon was linked with the relics of Saint Luke, even if there is no explicitmention in the lectionary that the panel was painted by the very hand of theEvangelist, whose relicshistoricallywere discovered in the abbey church in1177.11 By the fifteenth century, however, Lukes authorship of the SantaGiustina icon was championed at every turn, a development entirely in keepingwith the widespread interest, beginning in earnest in the second half of thefifteenth century, in establishing Lucan provenances for holy images.12 Writingat mid-century, the Paduan physician and historian Michele Savonarola proudlyrecords in his libellus on the citys magnificent ornaments the abbeyspossession of a panel, needing to be held in great reverence, on which theimage of the glorious Virgin and the infant Jesus by the fingers of the Evange-list of the Bull [i.e., Luke] is thus depicted.13 The German pilgrim Bernhardvon Breydenbach, furthermore, notes in his Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam(1486) that a greatly honoured image . . . [with] the effigy of the gloriousVirgin with the infant Jesus in her arm, which is said to have been painted bySaint Luke in person is to be found at Santa Giustina.14 Both Savonarola andvon Breydenbach stress the images miracle-working capacities: Savonarola, forinstance, details the icons efficacy, when invoked by the people and taken inprocession, against excessive dryness (siccitas) and humidity (humiditas).15

The wide discursive range of the Santa Giustina icon in fifteenth-century Padua is encapsulated in the most extensiveand interestingaccountabout the abbeys Lucan panel. In a letter to the monks of Santa Giustina, thePaduan bishop Pietro Barozzi (1487-1507) revisits the old translation legend(clearly still current in Padua), expressing doubts about the veracity of theevents before the eight-century translation of the image to Padua.16 Barozzi,however, upholds the Lucan authorship of the icon, by now firmly entrenched,and expounds on its miracle-working capacities, thus reiterating the (by now)familiar topoi for accounts of the Santa Giustina icon. To the list of miraclesassociated with the abbeys panel, Barozzi adds an account about the appear-ance of the Virgin to an abbot of Santa Giustina to admonish him not to repairher fragmentary image.17 Most interesting, however, is Barozzis attempt toexplain the icons miracle-working powers, an explanation clearly in line with hisreform policies and hostile attitude towards popular devotion to images:

It [the icon] can work miracles not in that it is a painting butbecause it is a work painted by the Apostle and Evangelist Luke.Indeed, it is plainly evident that many panels, painted by hishand in several reprises, work miracles, among which, if yoursdoes something more, that is, God acts more near it, perhapshe does this because it is located in that same place of worshipin which is located he who painted it.18

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The Santa Giustina icon in Barozzis reformist formulation (not to be mistakenfor general opinion, against which the bishop was protesting), then, is measuredagainst the Evangelists bodyit is almost, but not quite, a painted extension ofit, or, at the very least, a brandeum existing but a few meters from its point ofcontact.19

In marked contrast to the icon at Santa Giustina, for whose historyand cult we possess extensive documentary sources from the fifteenth century,much of the evidence bearing on the icon of the Virgin and Child in theDuomo of Padua is fragmentary and indirect. A commission, from votiveofferings rendered for miracles, given in 1498 by the cathedral chapter to thePaduan metalworker Anton Francesco della Seta for a silver frame for theDuomo icon suggests that the image was regarded as miracle-working by thisdate.20 The earliest textual account, itself not unambiguous, of the Duomo iconcomes from the will of Antonia Zabarella (d. 1441), whose influential familymaintained a burial chapel in the south transept of the cathedral. After record-ing her gift of an icon for the altar of Saint Luke (in the south transept),Zabarellas testament stipulates that the executors of her will are to sell a cloakand make two garments, namely a garment for the image of Our Lady and agarment for the image of Our Lord Jesus Christ [which are] placed in thecathedral church above the altar of the Blessed Mary.21 The imagines referredto here are generally believed to be identical with the Duomo icon. The willthus implies that the image, if we accept the term imagines as a reference not toa sculpted group of the Virgin and Child but rather to the figures in the paintedimage,22 was already located in the Zabarella chapel (over the Marian altar) inthe first half of the fifteenth century and that the two figures were clothed,perhaps only on special occasions, in garments of azure cotton and gold.23 ThatZabarella did not herself bequeath the Duomo icon is suggested by a cathedralinventory from 1472 (thus written some thirty years after Zabarellas will wasdrawn up), in which an icon painted with the entire passion of our Lord JesusChrist [and] with many short inscriptions is noted above the Pauline altar.24 Inthe second half of the sixteenth century, Bernardinus Scardeonius, a canon ofPadua cathedral, made explicit mention of a panel depicting the Virgin andChild in the Zabarella chapel, where the Duomo icon is presently located.25

Thus, the icon was, at least from the first half of the fifteenth century,housed in the cathedral, remaining over the course of the following centuriesand to this dayin its location above the Marian altar in the south transept ofthe Duomo. A relatively faithful copy of the Duomo icon, attributed by SergioBettini to the Paduan painter Giusto de Menabuoi (active second half offourteenth century) may be taken as evidence that the Duomo icon was indeedin the cathedral at an even earlier date.26

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On the basis of style, the Duomo icon is widely believed to have been paintedby an Italian artist sometime around 1300.27 Examining liturgical texts from thecathedral of Padua, Henk van Os demonstrated in the early 1970s that, by 1263at the latest, a painted panel of the Virgin and Child (anchona cum BeataVirgine Maria et Filio) served as a symbolic manger in the cathedrals Nativityplaycontrary to usual practice, in which a manger with a wooden effigy of theChild were deployed as props.28 Noting that, stylistically, the Duomo iconcannot be earlier than the liturgical text, van Os argued that the Duomo iconwas fashioned sometime in the closing decades of the thirteenth century toreplace the older anchona mentioned in the liturgical text.29 The Duomo icondoes indeed display curious features, such as the unusual swaddling cloth inwhich the Child is bound (a salient characteristic of the wooden effigies of theChild used in the liturgical drama), that would suggest that the icon wascustom made for the Nativity play.30 Moreover, the inscription in a four-teenth- or fifteenth-century hand along the lower edge of the wooden frame(covered in a fine linen and attached to the wooden support), which reads HICDEUS EST ET HOMO QUEM VIRGO PUERPERA PROMO (He is theGod and Man whom I, a virgin and woman in childbirth, bring forth), seemsto fit perfectly with the icons putative use in a liturgical performance centeredon the Incarnation.31 It is, however, uncertain whether the highly unusualclassicizing arch that frames the figures of the Virgin and Child is original to thepanel (such fictive arches are known in the Veneto around 1300).32 Given thatGiustos late-fourteenth-century copy of the Duomo icon omits this uniquefeature, the arch might well have been added to the image at a later date,perhaps around 1400.33

There is no documentary evidence that articulates unequivocallyMantegnas knowledge of and interest in the Santa Giustina and Duomo icons.There can, however, be little doubt that he saw both images, perhaps ratherfrequently, during the course of his training (in the studio of FrancescoSquarcione, whose celebrated collection of pedagogical materials might haveincluded icons34 ) and early career in Padua. Mantegnas stay in the city lastedwell over a decade, from 1448 to 1460, when the artist took up residence inMantua as court painter to Ludovico Gonzaga. Certainly, Mantegnas work onthe St. Luke Triptych (1453) for the chapel of St. Luke at Santa Giustina, oneof the artists first major commissions, offered him ample opportunity to reflecton the abbeys famous icon and become acquainted with the multiple layers ofits rich mythology.35 An early painting of the Evangelist Mark now in Frankfurt(Stdel Museum), moreover, likely painted around 1450, demonstratesMantegnas awareness of icon traditions and historical discourses in nearbyVenice, thus making any ignorance on Mantegnas part of the rhetoric sur-

Mantegna and Icons 27

rounding the venerated icons in his native Padua highly unlikely.36 Mantegnasinterest in and fledgling contacts with the nascent humanist culture in Padua,headed by such figures as Savonarola, might also have provided him with stillfurther access to the range of discourses surrounding the Paduan holy images.37

Some measure of the scope of Mantegnas engagement with contem-porary historical formulationsand of his involvement in humanist discourseson antiquitycan be gleaned from his renderings of the city of Jerusalem inthe two versions of The Agony in the Garden that he painted in the late 1450s.In a short article of 1977, Michael Vickers convincingly argued that Mantegnamodelled several architectural landmarks in the cities in both paintings, ostensi-bly those of Jerusalem, on salient monuments from Constantinople, including,in the London painting, the column of Justinian (with spirals rising from rightto left and not left to right, as on the historiated columns in Rome), thecelebrated Land Walls, and the Sphenodone (the round end of theConstantinopolitan Hippodrome).38 The eastern character of Mantegnaspainted cities is announced by the golden crescents that crown several of theedifices, a feature that, while carrying generalized connotations of the East,surely points in this context to Mantegnas awareness of the Turkish conquestof Constantinople in 1453, and perhaps even of the campaign, launched inMantua in 1459 by Pope Pius II, to reclaim the eastern city for Christendom.39

Among the monuments in the Tours panel is a monumental rotunda structurecapped by a large, relatively shallow dome, a representation of SolomonsTemple. As Vickers has demonstrated, Mantegnas temple is a more or lessfaithful reproduction of the rendering of the patriarchal church of HagiaSophia in a manuscript of the Notitia Dignitatum (1436).40 These features ofMantegnas virtual Constantinople were in all likelihood gleaned fromdrawings of Constantinopolitan monuments in sketchbooks, many of whichcould have been modelled on the manifold drawings made by Cyriac of Anconaduring his travels in the eastern lands.41

Seeking to explain why Mantegna would figure Jerusalem, on twooccasions, with recognizable landmarks from Constantinople, Vickers pointedto the long-standing Byzantine tradition that identified Constantinople as theNew Jerusalem, a tradition with which Mantegna might well have been famil-iar.42 This answer is, however, only partly satisfactory, resting as it does onByzantine rather than Italian criteria. Perhaps more relevant than foreigndiscourses are fifteenth-century Italian understandings of Constantinople,which held the eastern city to be a living link to Greek antiquity. Thus learnedItalian commentators could regard fifteenth-century Greek dress as antiquecostume,43 Greek-language scholarship as a vital channel of classical learning,and Greek panel paintings as exemplars of ancient painting.44 Therefore, when

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Andrew Martindale criticizes Vickerss argument by noting that in the fifteenthcentury the visual reconstruction of antiquity was in its infancy,45 he actuallyhelps to explain Mantegnas curious (to our eyes) conflation of the ancient cityof Jerusalem and Constantinople: for Mantegna, as for his contemporaries,Constantinople was antiquityone with a specifically eastern cast.

Mantegna, like his humanist contemporaries generally unequippedwith tools for drawing period (i.e., modern art historical) boundaries between awell-worn painted panel and a fragmentary marble statue, and no doubt familiarwith legends of Lucan authorship, Constantinopolitan provenances andmiraculous abilities, might well have seen in the icons in Padua images ofimposing antiquity and religious authority. It is therefore not difficult to imaginetheir significance for Mantegnas religious paintings. This is not to claim asimple, unidirectional path of influence from icon to modern painting, or tochampion the importance of the icon for Mantegna at the expense of other, noless important impulses, in particular Donatellos radical reworkings of theVirgin and Child theme in a series of half-length reliefs executed during theFlorentine sculptors stay in Padua. The most eloquent witnesses of Mantegnasattitude toward the icons in Padua are his paintings themselves, several ofwhichit must finally be noteddisplay iconographic and compositionalfeatures that are unthinkable without intimate knowledge of the two Paduanicons. Mantegnas engagement with icons, however, goes beyond mere citation(itself never the simple gesture that expressions such as mere citation imply).Instead, Mantegnas reinstantiations of the Paduan iconsand of icon types ingeneral (the Man of Sorrows, for instance)lay at the heart of Mantegnasthorough rethinking of problems and potential of religious painting.Mantegnas diverse strategies for image-making do not lend themselves to easyclassification; rather, the protean character of Mantegnas treatment of thesame fundamental themes over the course of his long career is itself emblem-atic of the probing nature of his enterprise.

Mantegna and the Madonna

Sometime after his move from Padua to the court of Ludovico Gonzaga inMantua, Mantegna painted a small painting, presumably intended for devotionaluse within a domestic context, of the Virgin cradling the swaddled figure of hersleeping Child (Fig. 2).46 There is every reason to believe that Mantegna had theSanta Giustina panel, well-known to him from his work at the abbey, in mindwhen painting the Poldi Pezzoli canvas. The points of contact between the twopaintings are numerous. Seen against an unmodulated blue-black background,

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Mantegnas figures are disposed in a manner similar to the Dexiokratousa-typecomposition of the Santa Giustina icon, the Virgins head in the Mantegnainclined slightly farther to the left to bring it into contact with the head of theChrist Child, whom she balances on her right knee. Mantegna, moreover,figured his Virgin with several physiognomic featuresalmond-shaped eyesand arched eyebrows, as well as the small, pinched mouth, modeling of the chinand tanned skin47 that accord well with those of the Virgin in the panel fromSanta Giustina. While Mantegnas painting is by no means a strict copy of theSanta Giustina icon, his degree of fidelity to the Lucan panel is remarkable. Alate work, Mantegnas Poldi Pezzoli Madonna borders on pictorial archaism;without effacing all trace of his own invention (the swaddling cloth motif,perhaps gleaned from the Duomo icon, and the vertical extension of thecomposition to include the Virgins knee, for instance), Mantegna allowed hissource to speak, rather audibly, through the layers of his own painterly perfor-mance.

That Mantegna was, from an early age, keenly aware of the rhetoricof archaism within the context of emergent discourses on what might be calledself-reflexive artistic production is suggested by his rendering of the easternsaint Gregory Nazianzus (c. 325-389) in the right panel of the San ZenoAltarpiece (1457-1460), the last major commission of Mantegnas Paduancareer. Gregory, pictured between John the Baptist and St. Lawrence, wearsresplendent red ecclesiastical vestments befitting his station as Bishop ofConstantinople. The saints eastern origins are announced by means of twoembroidered tondi containing half-length images of two saints, seen frontallyand, in the upper tondo, identified as Greeks through a pseudo-Greekinscription.48 The contrast between the hieratic, abstracted images in the tondion Gregorys garments and Mantegnas own image of the saint could not begreater. More than markers of Gregorys identity, the tondi clearly indicate thatMantegna recognized some difference between his own manner and that of theEast, here a distinctly Greek East, and even sought to stage differences betweenthese alternative modes, that of the East and his own. Mantegnas anachronis-tic (for us) coupling of two fictive icons to a figure from antiquity (painted inthe Quattrocento present) may even suggest that Mantegna saw icons asancient artfitting ornaments for a bishop from the ancient East. At thesame time, behind Mantegnas studied contrast between the old images andhis new image of the saint may reside an acknowledgement, made byMantegna himself, of his participation in a tradition of image-making stretchingback to antiquity. Indeed, cultivated anachronisms of this type could evenindicate that Mantegna, as well as his Christian humanist patron GregorioCorrer, could conceive of the newly-painted fifteenth-century altarpiece

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replete with figures from antiquity, classicizing architecture and, indeed, iconsfrom the Eastas but one link in a long chain of ancient images.49

The archaizing gesture operative in Mantegnas Poldi Pezzoli Ma-donna, I argue, registers quite clearly the painters attempt to balance the twopoles of substitution and performativity.50 The visual traces of the SantaGiustina icon in Mantegnas small painting aligned his image with the Lucanoriginal, thereby imbricating Mantegnas image (and, by extension, his ownpainterly practices) in the ancient and sacred origins of Christian painting asthese were formulated in the later fifteenth century around the figure of theEvangelist Luke. Through Mantegnas deference to the original, his paintingcould exist in a substitutional relationship with the Santa Giustina icon. At thesame time, the Poldi Pezzoli painting bears the unmistakable imprint ofMantegnas invention. The painting thus simultaneously displayed the traces ofits manufacture in a late-fifteenth-century present.

The Madonna in Milan is the closest Mantegna would come tocopying an icon. In this respect, it stands in marked contrast to anotherdevotional painting of the Virgin and Child, likewise painted in Mantua, andnow in Berlin (Fig. 3).51 The composition of the Berlin Madonna, with thesleeping Christ Child occupying the left-hand side of the pictorial space, recalls,despite the paintings possible links with Donatellos reliefs of the same theme,the unusual orientation of the figures in the Santa Giustina panel. Similarly, theswaddled Child was likely derived from the tightly bound infant in the Duomoicon. Yet, in this instance, the disarming simplicity and effect of naturalness52

with which Mantegna figures his holy subjects dissimulates, visually, theirrelationship to the Paduan icons. Pictured without any of the traditionaltrappings of their sanctity (haloes,53 regal garments, etc.), the figures couldeasily be taken for an ordinary fifteenth-century mother and child presented enbuste with remarkable psychological penetration.54 Mantegnas painterlyinvention here seemingly supersedes its sources (including Donatellos naturalis-tic treatments of the theme), the traces of the Paduan icons only faintlydetectable in the composition and the swaddling cloth.

Yet, the paintings remarkable naturalismthat is, the predominanceof Mantegnas performative gesturedoes not mean that it, any less than thearchaizing Poldi Pezzoli image, cannot be reconciled with the paradigm ofsubstitution. The strategy underlying Mantegnas Berlin painting, I suggest here,mirrors similar pictorial processes in later fifteenth-century religious painting,observable, above all, in Antonello da Messinas strikingly naturalistic half-length images of holy figures. Antonellos Annunziata in Munich, for instance,was made in response to an icon, in this case a Lucan panel at Fermo Cathedral,with Antonellos composition replicating the unusual crossed arms of the

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Virgin in the icon.55 As Hans Belting has argued, Antonellos image blurs theboundaries between holy image and portraiture: the paintings dark backgroundand half-length composition, as well Antonellos interest in giving outward,visual form to the Virgins inner psychological state, allies his image withcontemporary portraiture.56 The open book in front the Virgin, however, servesto historicize Antonellos painting, which, Belting suggests, transcends theordinary portrait by the implied narrative of the Virgins pregnancy.57 In hisimage of the Virgin and Child, Mantegna effaces even more emphatically theconnection between the pictured figures and sacred history: whereas Antonelloprovides his Virgin with a thin halo and pictures her reading at a ledge recallingthe prie-dieu of earlier Annunciation scenes, Mantegna omits all overt signifiersof his figures sanctity. The swaddling cloth alone, emblematic alternately bothof the Nativity and the Passion (the Deposition), locates Mantegnas figureswithin an implied narrative. Mantegnas painting, then, breaks down evenfurther the boundaries between the ordinary portrait and sacred image, andthis may make it representative of what Belting, discussing AntonellosAnnunziata, calls modern icons predicated on radically modernconception[s] of the image.58 While Belting is, of course, right to point todifferences between old and modern icons, his use of the term modernemphasizes the forward-looking aspect of Antonellos image at the expense ofits complex links with the past. Figuring such moments as radical rupturesdiminishes the substitutional potency of modern icons by stressing theimportance of their performative (i.e., artistic) qualities, in Antonellos casehis portrait-like treatment of the Virgin. Rather, the naturalistic intensificationof the holy image operative in Mantegnas Berlin Madonna (and AntonellosAnnunziata) might be read more fruitfully as an effort to expose and thusdevelop the possibilities latent in the old images. That is to say: what if, forMantegna, rendering the Virgin and Child with a degree of naturalism approxi-mating that of modern (i.e., late fifteenth-century) portraiture was but a meansof arriving at an Urbild, an attempt to remove the accretions to which theimage of the Virgin and Child had been subjected over the course of centuries?

In keeping with this particular strategy for refiguring the devotionalimage is Mantegnas development of the half-length narrative scene presentedin what Ringbom has dubbed dramatic close-up. Not only are half-lengthnarrative paintings such as Mantegnas Presentation in the Temple replete withpsychological intensity, the very expansion of the single half-length figure into anarrative image bespeaks a particularly fifteenth-century desire for moreplausible imagesand, by extension, for more immediate ways of experienc-ing and partaking in sacred history.59 Stressing the particularity of the Virginsalmost full-profile pose in Mantegnas Presentation, Ringbom has sought to

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locate the source of Mantegnas image of the Virgin and Child in Donatellosmanifold reliefs of the same theme.60 Donatellos Madonna reliefs, writesRingbom, made a very suitable base for augmentation in the form of addi-tional figures consisting of symbolic heads or busts introduced into thecomposition.61 Whereas the frontality characteristic of traditional images ofthe Virgin tended to negate the dramatic augmentation of this image type,Ringbom argues, profile images of the Virgin lent themselves easily to expan-sion into narrative scenes.62 For Ringbom, however, it was Mantegnas remark-able invention to develop a plausible historical contextthe Presentation of theinfant Christ to Temple priest Simeonwithin which the previously isolatedhalf-length figure of the Virgin might become part of a larger narrativewhole.63

There can be little doubt that Donatellos reliefs of the Virgin andChild, as well as ancient funerary reliefs,64 figured large in Mantegnas concep-tion of the Presentation in the Temple. Mantegnas window casement may beseen as widened version of the window frame in Donatellos Pazzi Madonna,serving, as it does in the Donatello, to endow what would otherwise be arelatively flat image with depth.65 In addition to the royal connotations of thetruncated figure presented en buste,66 here carried over to holy figures,Mantegnas fictive frame may also betoken a fundamental anxiety about the verynearness he has established into borrow Ringboms formulationhisdramatic close-up. Yet, there are other features of Mantegnas image thatcannot be so easily reconciled with Donatellos reliefs. The erect posture of theChild, the swaddling clothes and the tasseled velvet cushion under the Childsfeet all represent a departure from Donatellos Paduan Madonnas, which arecharacterized by an interest in figuring the close emotional bonds betweenmother and child. With the exception of the cushion, these same features arepresent in the Duomo icon, in which the Virgin, framed by a round-headedarch, literally presents for the viewers contemplation the stiff figure of theswaddled Christ. The unusual architectural frame of the Duomo icon, just asmuch as the arch in Donatellos Pazzi Madonna, could have furnishedMantegna with a device for containing and framing his narrative, for mediatingbetween the sacred event and its beholder. Furthermore, the very pose of theVirgin in the Duomo iconstanding behind a ledge, her right arm swept overthe Child in an type of indicatory gesture, and locking eyes with the viewermight have prompted Mantegna both in his choice of theme of the Presenta-tion and in his half-length rendering of it, just as the Lucan icon in Fermo, animage type not associated with the Annunciation but later interpreted as suchthrough the addition to the icons frame of a Gothic reliquary inscribed withthe word Annuntiatio,67 could form the basis for Antonellos compacted

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rendering of the Annunciation narrative. I simply wish to make the point herethat, while Mantegna could have derived the profile view of the Virgin fromDonatello, it would not have been beyond the painters powers, and perhapsmore in keeping with his profound interest in re-presenting antiquity, to subjectthe Duomo icon, a venerated image of considerable authority, to a fundamentalreformulationto a narrative expansion that encourages empathic entry intoChrists Infancy. In this instance, icon did indeed lead to narrative.

I have been making the case here that Mantegnas engagement withthe icons in Padua went well beyond the adoption of this or that motif. Part ofMantegnas thorough rethinking of the icon, and of religious painting ingeneral, lies in the realm of experience. We must not forget the profoundimpression that the contexts and circumstances of display of ancient andpotent images in fifteenth-century Europethe mis-en-scne of cult imagesmust have made upon contemporaries. Several of Mantegnas paintings register,in different ways, his somatic experience of the icons in Padua. KeithChristiansen has, for instance, suggested that Mantegnas striking full-lengthimage of the Infant Redeemer (Fig. 6), likely painted circa 1455-60 in Padua,might have been conceived with the Duomo icon in mind.68 The insistentfrontality and physiognomy of Mantegnas Child, figured against a darkbackground of variegated marbles and standing on a small marble ledge, pointup the images relationships with the Duomo icon.69 Christiansenrightlylocates Mantegnas possible motivation for the transformation of the DuomoChild into a hieratic image of the Infant Redeemer in the use of the Duomoicon in the Paduan Nativity play, writing of the play that the Child, rather thanthe Virgin, was the object of veneration and of the inscription on the iconsframe70 that it would not be inappropriate for Mantegnas picture.71 Theveneration shown the Duomo icon in the Nativity play was doubtless a potentspectacle, with a multitude of actors circling and censing the image, itselfcovered with a cloth before its dramatic revelation to the faithful. The experien-tial field of the liturgical drama could easily have set Mantegna thinking aboutnovel ways to figure not only close-up views of individual figures, but alsoexpanded narrative paintings centered on the Virgin and Child (his Adorationof the Shepherds, ca. 1450-51, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, forexample). Indeed, in addition to the Nativity play, Mantegnas conception of theInfant Redeemer was fed by still other aspects of the devotional cadre sur-rounding the Duomo icon. The azure and gold cloak worn by MantegnasChildalso a prominent feature in his early image of the Virgin and Child,shown, significantly, behind a ledge and under a round-headed arch akin to thatof the Duomo icon72 may represent Mantegnas awareness of and responseto the contemporary practice, recorded in the Zabarella will of 1441, of

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clothing the figures of the Duomo icon in garments of azure cotton embla-zoned with golden inscriptions.

Mantegna and the Man of Sorrows

The importance of the experiential field for Mantegnas conception of religiouspainting, observable above all in his full-length narrative scenes, is paralleledbyis indeed likely symptomatic ofhis profound interest in time. In asensitive reading of the complex temporality of the celebrated St. Sebastian inVienna (ca. 1457-59, Kunsthistorisches Museum), Jack Greenstein has calledattention to Mantegnas sophisticated sense of time, history and the diachronichistoricity of invention.73 Working from Peter Burkes third criterion of theRenaissance sense of the past, namely the interest in causality which manifestsitself in the attempt to explain historical events on the basis of their temporalsuccession and the circumstances in which they occurred,74 Greenstein hasargued that Mantegnas historical narratives display a probing concern withthese very same phenomena, his paintings deliberately combining multipletime-frames.75 In the case of Mantegnas St. Sebastian, time is figured in thecontorted body of the saint: the pattern of the arrows and variegated length ofthe streams of blood that issue from Sebastians wounds record the unfoldingof his execution and the time-span of the saints suffering.76 The temporalityof human experience registered in the saints body unfolds within epochaltime, or the natural, social or historical [time period] during which an actionoccurred, here indicated by the ruins of a classicizing arch that Greensteininterprets as the ruins of a Roman basilica.77 The Greek inscription on thearchMantegnas signatureis presented in such a way to suggest that it wasoriginally invisible under the basilicas Roman surface. The inscription thusserves, Greenstein argues, both to situate the paintings action in epochaltimethe end of Greco-Roman antiquityand to signal, for the knowingviewer, the paintings fabrication by a contemporary painter in the later years ofthe fifteenth century (what Greenstein calls the authorial present).78 Thepainting thus functions temporally on two levels: painted in a lateQuattrocento authorial present, the image clearly fixes Sebastians execution,experienced on a human level, to a determinate point in the past and articulates,on a trans-historical level, the lasting devotional import of saints holy suffer-ing.79

Greensteins discussion of Mantegnas painterly temporalities offers auseful starting point for thinking about the artists half-length images of theadult Christ. These paintings, just as much as the painters full-length narrative

Mantegna and Icons 35

images, betray Mantegnas attempts to inscribe his images with markers ofmultiple time-frames. In his Ecce Homo (Fig. 7)a close-up frontal view of ascourged Christ with the crown of thorns and surrounded by four of hispersecutorsMantegna made recourse to a familiar pictorial structure, namelythe half-length narrative form of the early Presentation in the Temple.80 AsRingbom notes, Mantegna, in picturing his Christ with crossed rather thanextended arms, built his narrative around the traditional Man of Sorrows typeand not Donatellos version of the theme from the altar of the Santo in Padua,the latter image part of a long-standing Italian tradition of three-quarter-lengthimages of the Man of Sorrows in which Christs arms are presented at hisside.81 Called to Rome in 1488 and staying on through 1490, Mantegna wouldhave had ample opportunity to acquaint himself with the highly veneratedGregorian Man of Sorrows in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Mantegna thusbypassed Italian traditions, and structured his rendering of an isolated momentwithin the extended narrative of Christs Passion around what was commonlyunderstood as an ancient image type. In picturing two of Christs persecutorswith hats carrying Pseudo-Hebrew82 inscriptions, Mantegna firmly anchoredthe Man of Sorrows type in epochal time, endowing his scene with bothgeographical (the East) and historical (antiquity) specificity. Mantegna, more-over, provided his image with subtle indications of the chronological denoue-mentthe before, now, and afterof the compacted scene. Narrativetime is thus inscribed in the form of the lashes on Christs body (themselvesalso marks of the temporality of human experience) that point back in timeto the Flagellation; and it is inscribed literally on two cartellini in the uppercorners of the picture, which, in giving visual form to the otherwise un-representable auditory utterance CRVCIFIGE EVM / TOLLE EVM /CRVCIFIGE EVM (crucify him, take him and crucify him), point forward intime to the Crucifixion. Yet, for all his interest in articulating temporal specific-ity, Mantegna emphasized, rather clearly, the trans-historical import of thenarrative moment, or its devotional time. In raising Christs sunken head fromhis right shoulder, Mantegna opened up the canonical Gregorian Man ofSorrows to inclusion within a half-length narrative context, all the whilemaintaining the types devotional appeal: Christs full face, turned slightly to hisleft, becomes, along with his body, an object of contemplation within a frozennarrative moment, his tortured yet idealized physiognomy played off against thehideous features of his assailants.83 The hieratic frontality of the figure ofChrist, his abstracted separation from the narrative context, the clear linksbetween Mantegnas Christ and the original Gregorian typeall bespeak theunderlying substitutional impulse of the Ecce Homo. The archetypal Gregorianimage was thus figured in Mantegnas painting as a point of mediation between

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the sacred event, rooted in epochal time, and the (late-fifteenth-century)devotional present.

Another frontal image of Christ, the striking Christ as Redeemer(1493, Fig. 8), is indicative of the ways in which Mantegnas rethinking of theicon was predicated on a sophisticated understanding of the complex interplaybetween authorship, devotion and the ontological status of the religious image.Mantegnas cropped view of Christs bust is in many ways a pictorial equivalentof the letter of Lentulus: Mantegnas portrait-like image dwells on Christsnoble physiognomyhis well-formed facial features, his fine beard and hair, hiscomely stature. The images pretensions to true appearance are underscored bythe inscription on the book which Christ holds in his hands, EGO SVMNOLITE TIMERE (It is I, have no fear), a direct address spoken by Christto the Apostles both before his death (after walking on water, Matthew 14:27)and after the Resurrection (Luke 24:36).84 The almost visionary immediacy ofthe painted figure is mediated by a small red frame whose appearance approxi-mates that of a window casement; the regal associations of this device85 accordwith Christs sumptuous purple cloak and red gown (with a pseudo-Kuficinscription around the collar, thus figuring Christ as eastern). The frame bothdelimits and defines the image. A vertical inscription along the left edge of thefictive frame articulates the paintings devotional aspect in admonishing, in thesecond person plural, the beholder(s) to mortify yourselves before the effigyof my face (MOMORDITE VOS MET IPSOS ANTE EFFIGIEM VVLTVSMEI). The inscription thus verbalizes the images claims as veristic effigy.Another inscription along the lower edge of the frame indicates that thepainting was offered as a gift by the painter Andrea Mantegna.86 At the sametime, however, the lower inscription pulls the imageparaded as an effigy withsome kind of purchase on authenticityinto the sphere of Mantegnasauthorial present. In the Redeemer, paintings claims to authenticity are,therefore, not located in fidelity to a type (as they are in Mantegnas EcceHomo, for instance), but rather are premised upon Mantegnas scrutinizingvisual description of Christs countenance.

Mantegnas Redeemer, like so many of his works, betrays the artistscomplex attitude toward negotiating icon types within his own painterlyeconomy. The argument here has been that Mantegna felt, as did so many latefifteenth century artists, the substitutional pull of the icon. His response wasvaried: at times, Mantegna made conspicuous overtures to venerated originals,whether through archaism or the retention of a canonical type; alternatively,reinstantiation could consist of more (but never completely) performativestrategies (half-length narrative, for instance). Modern scholarship, in choosingto stress Mantegnas undeniable interest in a pure classical antiquity, has

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largely written icons out of Mantegnas painterly antiquarianism. To be sure,Mantegnas painting is unthinkable without the classical past. But it is alsounthinkable without the icon.

Notes

1 Jack M. Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative (Chicago andLondon: Chicago University Press, 1992), 64.2 On the relationships between Mantegnas painting and relief sculpture(especially that of classical antiquity), see Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna. With aComplete Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986),63, and Lawrence Gowing, Mantegna, in Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. (Londonand Milan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992), 5-6.3 See, for example, Rona Goffen, Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellinis Half-Length Madonnas, Art Bulletin 57, no. 4 (1975), 487-518, and Hans Belting,Giovanni Bellinis Piet: Ikone und Bildererzhlung in der venezianischen Malerei (Frank-furt: Fischer, 1985).4 Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo: Abo Akedemi, 1965), 72-77.5 Ibid., 77-90.6 Apart from Mantegnas numerous Sacra Conversazione-type paintings (consist-ing essentially of multiple saints grouped around the central figures of theVirgin and Child), only two half-length narrative images of the Virgin and Childby Mantegna (the Presentation in the Temple in Berlin and the later Adoration of theMagi (ca. 1500) in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, both discussed by Ringbom)survive.7 For a twelfth-century date, see I Benedettini a Padova e nel territorio padovanoattraversoi secoli, exh. cat. (Padua: Abbazia di Santa Giustina, 1980), cat. no. 286,361 (G. Lorenzoni). Hans Belting (Likeness and Presence: A History of the Imagebefore the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1994], 343) and Michele Bacci (Il pennello dellEvangelista: Storia delleimmagini sacre attribuite a San Luca [Pisa: Gisem, 1998], 318) date the panel to thethirteenth century; both argue that it was painted in Italy (Bacci: una tavolaprobabilmente italiana), with Belting suggesting the Veneto as the likely placeof origin.8 Maria Pia Billanovich, La moneta falsa rinvenuta nella Tomba di San Lucaa Padova, in Monastica et Humanistica: Scritti in onore di Gregorio Penco O.S.B., ed.Francesco G. Tirolese (Cesena: Badia di Santa Maria del Monte, 2003), 703 n.25.9 Luca Evangelista: parola e imagine tra Oriente e Occidente, exh. cat. (Padua: Il

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Poligrafo, 2000), cat. no. 75, 405 (Michele Bacci).10 The legend is found in an account (fols. 32v-36r) about qualiter beatorumLuce evangeliste Mathie apostoli corpora fuerunt de Constantinopoli translataPatavium. On the translation legend, see Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 406. Onthe Santa Giustina lectionary (Staatsbibliothek, Preuischer Kulturbesitz,Berlin), see Mantegna e Padova, 1445-1460, exh. cat. (Padua: Comune di Padova,2006), cat. no. 9, 158.11 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 343.12 On Lucan panels in fifteenth-century Italy, see Bacci, Il pennellodellEvangelista, chapter 4.13 . . . tabula illa, magnaque in veneratione habenda, qua Virginis glorioseveneranda imago Iesusque infantis institis soluti digitis Evangeliste bovis sicdepicta iacet (Michele Savonarola, Libellus de magnificis ornamentis regie civitatisPadue, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. Arnaldo Segarizzi (Citt di Castello: S.Lapi, 1902), XXIV, pt. XV: 14; unless otherwise indicated, all translations aremine).14 Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 405, with an Italian translation (on which I basemy translation here) of Breydenbachs original text.15 . . . quam [i.e., the icon] quidem et populus ipse colit, sicque ex ea confidit,ut, aut nimia aeris siccitas aut grandis humiditas in segetum arefactionem autcorruptionem veniens, eius solempni ac devota, qua decet, per civitatemgloriosa gestatione, populi devotis etiam additis orationibus, colatur(Savonarola, Libellus [see my note 13 above], 14).16 The translation legend continued, in slightly modified form, into thesixteenth century and beyond. J. Cavaciuss 1606 history of the monks of SantaGiustina (Historiarum coenobii d. Iustinae Patavinae Libri sex [Venice, 1606],unavailable to me; see Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 406) recounts the translationlegend, preserving the eight-century translation by Urius but omitting the firemiracle. Indeed, the epithet Madonna Costantinopolitana, under which the iconcontinues to be discussed, appears to be a post-Council of Trent invention(Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 406).17 Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 405. From the sixteenth century to 1959, whenthe first of two physical examinations of the Santa Giustina icon was carriedout, a revetment and a copy of the icon (according to G. Lorenzoni, in IBenedettini a Padova, cat. no. 268, 361) covered the original image. Now veryfragmentary, the Santa Giustina icon seems, then, to have been damaged,perhaps by fire, at some point before the copy and silver-gilt revetment wereplaced over it (unfortunately, none of the publications on the Santa Giustinaicon reproduces the copy and revetment). The damage also appears to predateBarozzis late fifteenth-century letter recording the Virgins miraculous interven-

Mantegna and Icons 39

tion against restoration of any sort. This remarkable miracle represents anextremely interesting instance of early modern attitudes toward the conserva-tion of venerable works of art. Unlike so many highly venerated miracle-working images, which were often subject to extensive repaintings, the restora-tion of the Santa Giustina icon, in a manner similar to the icon at Santa MariaAntiqua in Rome, entailed not a touch up, but rather the preservation of thefragmentary original through concealment with a copy, itself shielded by therevetment.18 Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 75, 405, with an Italian translation (the basis for myEnglish version) of Barozzis original text.19 In his Libellus, Savonarola indicates that the Lucan icon was located in thechapel of St. Prodoscimus, the first Bishop of Padua. By contrast, the pilgrimvon Breydenbach records in his account of the abbey that an image of theVirgin and Child painted by Luke was located above the very tomb of theEvangelist. The attribution of the image to Luke and the stress on its venera-tion in both Savonarola and von Breydenbach suggest that both are speakingabout the same image, and yet they each proffer a variant location for it. Whomdo we trust: the local historian Savonarola or the foreign traveller vonBreydenbach? Or can it be that in the space of the forty years between the twoaccounts the image was moved from the chapel of Prodoscimus to the Lucanchapel? Such a move, by physically strengthening the association of panel withits putative maker, would be entirely in keeping with prevalent practices ofmyth-making for cult images in the fifteenth century, most especially theattribution of paintings to Evangelist Luke.20 An inscription, on the lower edge of the frame, reads: Ant. Franc. A. Seta.Pat. Opus Auctor. Cap. Pat. ex votis miraculorum oblationibus. An. Salut MCCCCIIC(This [frame] is the work of Anton Francesco of Seta, a Paduan. The chapterof Padua [had it made] from votive offerings [rendered for] miracles. In theyear of salvation 1498). On the frame, see Andrea Moschetti, Il tesoro dellaCattedrale di Padova, Dedalo 6 (1925), 287-90.21 . . . ordinavit dita [dicta] testatrix quod mantelus suus de pano moreloscuro per suos comissariosinfrascriptos vendatur et de precio ematur tanta sindon azura qua fiant duevestes videlicet unus manteluspro imagine domine nostre et una vestis pro imagine domini nostri iesu christipositis in ecclesia cattedralisuper altare beate marie, super quibus vestibus pingatur de auro videlicet supermantelo domine nostre avemaria in pluribus locis, et super vestem imaginis domini nostri yhu xpi similiternomen Jesus de auro fino,ecc. The full Latin text of the will (Liber 2 instrum.m

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Joanis Piati [1435-1442], Padua, ArchivioNotarile) is reprinted in Andrea Moschetti, La Madonna trecentesca delDuomo di Padova, in Padova inonore di Fr. Petrarca MCMIIII (Padua: Societ Cooperativa Tipografica, 1909), 2:155-56.22 As Irene Hueck (Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von PaduaRom undByzanz, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 13 [1967], 6) does. Thepractice of dressing painted panels in sumptuous garments was by no meansunknown in this period.23 Moschetti (La Madonna trecentesca del Duomo di Padova, 151) reportsthat, in 1909, the painted figures were still clothed, and that, under the Virginsmodern garment (il mantello moderno della Vergine) pieces of a much oldergarment were still to be found. The fixing of garments to the image wouldperhaps explain the pin holes to either side of the two figures recorded byHueck (Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von Padua, 1).24 Capellania ad dictum altare sancti Pauli dotata per olim bone memorieRe.um d num Cardinalem de Zabarellis [. . . .] Item una Anchona depicta cumtota passione d.ni Jesu X.i multis brevibus scriptis (Cathedral inventory, 1472,Padua, Archivio Capitolare; cited in Moschetti, La Madonna trecentesca delDuomo di Padova, 156).25 Bernardinus Scardeonius, De antiquitate urbis Patavii et claris civibus Patavinis(Basel: Nicolaum Episcopem iuniorem, 1560), 370.26 Sergio Bettini, Una Madonna di Giusto de Menabuoi nella BibliotecaCapitolare di Padova, Bollettino dArte 10 (1930): 70-75; see, too, Da Giotto al Mantenga, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa,1974), cat. no. 51, unpaginated, and Luca Evangelista, cat. no. 76, 408.27 Hueck (Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von Padua, 12), comparing the panelto fresco painting in Assisi and Padua, offers a date of 1300-1320. Henk van Os(The Madonna and the Mystery Play, Simiolus 5 [1971], 12) maintains that thePadua Madonna is certainly a work of the late thirteenth century.28 Van Os, The Madonna and the Mystery Play, 8.29 Ibid., 19.30 Ibid., 18. Van Os reproduces two such late medieval Italian effigies (see hisFigs. 7 and 9).31 Ibid., 19.32 A similar arch frames, for instance, the figure of St. Helen in the frescoes ofSan Zan Degola in Venice, generally dated to the late thirteenth century; see vanOs, The Madonna and the Mystery Play, 9 and his Fig. 2. Both Hueck and vanOs have argued that the arch in the Duomo icon is original to the painting.33 As has been suggested in a guidebook (Padova: Guida ai monumenti e alle opere

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darte [Venice, 1961], 557) cited by Hueck (Ein Madonnenbild im Dom vonPadua, 9) but unavailable to me.34 Scardeonius, for instance, records in his history of Padua that Squarcionetravelled (likely in the years around 1430) throughout Italy and Greece. SeeLightbown, Mantegna, 18-19, who writes, moreover, that Squarcione seems tohave shared this taste, for an icon signed by Emanuel Zarfenari, now in theVatican, was believed in the early eighteenth century to have belonged toSquarcione.35 On Mantegnas work at Santa Giustina, see Lightbown, Mantegna, 401.36 The phrase PAX TIBI M[ARC]E on the painted cartellino affixed to the frontface of the balustrade behind which Mark stands presupposes, on Mantegnaspart, an intimate knowledge, likely gained through his contacts with the Bellinis,of the legend of Marks translationthe praedestinatioas formulated by themakers of fifteenth-century Venetian civic ideology (the Gospel book held bythe sculpted lion on Porta della Carta, erected in the 1440s, carries the sameinscription: PAX TIBI MARCE / EVANGELISTA MEUS). For a reproduc-tion and discussion, see Debra Pincus, Mark Gets the Message: Mantegna andthe Praedestinatio in Fifteenth-Century Venice, Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35(1997), 135-146.37 On Mantegnas extensive links with humanist culture, see David Chambers,Jane Martineau and Rodolfo Signorini, Mantegna and the Men of Letters, inMantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), 8-29.38 Reproduced and discussed in Michael Vickers, Mantegna andConstantinople, BurlingtonMagazine 118, no. 883 (1976), 683-4.39 Ibid., 684; on Mantegnas knowledge of the Mantuan council, see J. H.Whitfield, Letters: Mantegna and Constantinople, Burlington Magazine 119, no.886 (1977), 41, and Chambers, Martineau and Signorini, Mantegna and theMen of Letters, 15.40 Vickers, Mantegna and Constantinople, 683.41 Ibid., 680, 687. Cyriac visited Padua in 1443, where here completed a copyof the corpus of inscriptions he made during his eastern travels for PietroDonato, Bishop of Padua. The inscriptions were copied in the 1450s by FeliceFeliciano, who was, as Chambers, Martineau and Signorini (Mantegna and theMen of Letters, 10) observe, later to be one of Mantegnas closest friends.42 Vickers, Mantegna and Constantinople, 687.43 As could artists. In his Flagellation (ca. 1455-60, Galleria Nazionale delleMarche, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino), Piero della Francesca pictured Pontius Pilatewith a peaked Greek hat similar to the one with which the fifteenth-centuryGreek emperor John VIII Palaiologus was imaged (by Pisanello and others)

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while in northern Italy for the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39). SeeByzantium: Faith and Power, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,2004), cat. 319, 534 n. 3.44 On the reception of Byzantine culture in Quattrocento Italy, see RobertNelson, Byzantium and the Rebirth of Art and Learning in Italy and France,in Byzantium: Faith and Power, 515-23, and, additionally, Anthony Cutler, FromLoot to Scholarship: Changing Modes in the Italian Response to ByzantineArtifacts, ca. 1200-1700, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995), 237-67.45 Andrew Martindale, Letters: Mantegna and Constantinople, BurlingtonMagazine 119, no. 892 (1977),506.46 On the painting, now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in Milan, see Lightbown,Mantegna, 423, and Mantegna a Mantova, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2006), cat. no. 18,102, both with further bibliography. Suggested dates for the painting rangefrom the 1480s (Lightbown) to the mid-1490s (Mauro Lucco, Mantegna aMantova).47 The painting has been much darkened by nineteenth-century conserva-tion and varnishing; thus, it is difficult to know to what extent the dark skintones reflect Mantegnas original conception. See Mantegna a Mantova, cat. no. 18,102.48 Lightbown, Mantegna, 72.49 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Toward a New Model ofRenaissance Anachronism, Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005), 403-15.50 I borrow these terms from Nagel and Wood, Toward a New Model ofRenaissance Anachronism, 403-15, esp. 413. My discussion of archaism andanachronism here is especially indebted to their model.51 Various dates have been proposed for the painting. Christiansen (inMantegna, exh. cat. [as in note 2], cat. no. 41, 205) dates it to circa 1465-70, orshortly after Mantegnas move to Ludovicos court. Other scholars have dated itmuch later, placing it among Mantegnas late works of the 1490s (e.g.,Lightbown, Mantegna, 424).52 Christiansen (Mantegna, exh. cat. [as in note 2], cat. no. 41, 205.53 Christiansen (ibid.) notes that both physical examinations of the painting (in1991, on the occasion of the blockbuster Mantegna show in London and NewYork in the following year) and x-radiographs indicate that the figures werenever provided with haloes.54 Ibid.55 For reproductions of Antonellos panel and its model, see Belting, Likenessand Presence, Fig. 211 (Antonello) and Pl. VII (Fermo icon).

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56 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 346.57 Ibid.58 Ibid., 348.59 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 89, speaks of a need to enrich and elaborate thetraditional forms of Madonna devotional images.60 Ibid., 74.61 Ibid., 75.62 Ibid., 76.63 Ibid., 77.64 Ibid., 76; see, too, Keith Christiansen, Devotional Works: Mantua, inMantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), 154-55.65 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 76.66 On the majestic associations of the half-length portrait and parapet, seethe useful discussion in ibid., 39-48.67 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 346.68 Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 15, 147.69 However, Christiansens observation (ibid) that the Christ Child in theDuomo icon raises his right hand in blessingas Mantegnas Infant Redeemerdoesis incorrect: the blessing hand of Mantegnas Child is thus not a straight-forward borrowing from the Duomo icon. The blessing gesture is, rather,Mantegnas painterly interpretation of the Duomo Christs raised hand, one thatis more in keeping with the rhetoric of his image of the Christ Child as Saviour.70 Which Christiansen translates as This is God and Man born of a Virgin.Christiansens translation of the inscription on the Duomo icon does not renderthe fact that it is the Virgin herself who articulates to the viewer her own role inthe Incarnation (This is God and Man, whom I, a virgin and a woman inchildbirth, bring forth)a significant utterance that may also stand behindMantegnas conception of the Berlin Presentation in the Temple.71 Ibid.72 This small panel (44.1 x 28.6 cm), the so-called Butler Madonna now in NewYork, shows clear traces of cropping; it is likely that the fictive arch approxi-mated that of Mantegnas near-contemporary St. Mark (that is, with front facesand spandrels). See Christiansen, Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 12,139.73 Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative, 71-85 (quote at 62).74 Ibid., 64.75 Ibid., 64-71, with quote at 71.76 Ibid., 73.77 Ibid., 75-79.78 Ibid., 80.

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79 Ibid., 83.80 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 146.81 Ibid.82 Christiansen, Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 61, 245.83 Ibid.84 Ibid., cat. no. 54, 231.85 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 51-2.86 The inscription has been reconstructed as [Andrea Mantin]ia p[inxit] (orp[ictor]) c[haritate] s[ua] d[ono] d[edit] MCCCCLXXXXIII d[ie] V Ja[nuari](Andrea Mantegna painted this out of charity and gave it as an offering on 5January 1493). For the reconstruction, with translation (reproduced here), seeChristiansen, Mantegna, exh. cat. (as in note 2), cat. no. 54, 231.

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1 Andrea Mantegna, Presentation in the Temple, ca. 1455, distemper on canvas, 68.9x 86.3 cm, Gemldegalerie, Berlin (after Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna. With aComplete Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Prints [Oxford: Phaidon, 1986], pl.4)

2 Andrea Mantegna, Virgin and Child, ca. 1490s (?), distemper on canvas, 43 x 45cm, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (after Mantegna a Mantova, exh. cat. [Milan: Skira,2006], p. 103)

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3 Andrea Mantegna, Virgin and Child, ca. 1465-70, distemper on canvas, 42 x 32cm, Gemldegalerie, Berlin (after Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. [London and Milan:Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 206)

4 Madonna Costantinopolitana, twelfth or thirteenth century (Italian?), 88 x53 x 4 cm, Abbey of Santa Giustina, Padua (after Luca Evangelista: parola eimagine tra Oriente e Occidente, exh. cat. [Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2000], p. 407)

Mantegna and Icons 47

5 Virgin and Child, ca. 1300, 117 x 82 cm, Duomo, Padua (after Irene Hueck,Ein Madonnenbild im Dom von PaduaRom und Byzanz, Mitteilungen desKunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 13 [1967], p. 2)

6 Andrea Mantegna, Infant Redeemer, ca. 1455-60, tempera (?) on canvas, 70.2 x34.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (after Andrea Mantegna, exh.cat. [London and Milan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 148)

48 Adam Stead

7 Andrea Mantegna, Ecce Homo, ca. 1500, distemper on canvas, 54 x 42 cm,Muse Jacquemart-Andr, Paris (after Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. [London andMilan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 246)

8 Andrea Mantenga, Christ the Redeemer, 1493, distemper on canvas, 55 x 43 cm,Museo Il Correggio, Correggio (after Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. [London andMilan: Thames and Hudson and Electa, 1992], p. 232)