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By Root 2835 0

king, all presented in sumptuous detail, in gold, vermilion, purple and olive green—and a variety of other colors—meandering through fields and towns, with camels, horses, asses, mules and dogs, leopards chasing deer, birds and flowers, exotic trees and castles, all done to astonish and dazzle. Many of those presented in the processions are portraits of Medici family members and their followers, and there is a head of Benozzo himself. This room, which has other works by Benozzo in its sanctuary, is one of the finest achievements of the Renaissance, for the frescoes, now restored, are well preserved and near enough to the visitor for the details to be relished. No one who has been in this enchanting room is likely to forget it. It is Renaissance religious entertainment at its innocent best, a celebration of the joy of living in a world of beauty and fun.

A similar but far more formidable work in Mantua, the Camera degli Sposi of Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), finished in 1474, indicates the rapid progress that Italian painting was now making, and also the difference between an accomplished artist of the second rank, like Gozzoli, and a great master. Mantegna was a difficult man and a slow worker, for nearly half a century the court painter to the Gonzagas of Mantua, who coped with his shortcomings in saintly manner. (One of the sources of Renaissance strength, it is worth repeating, was the willingness of proud princes to submit to the artistic temperament.) He had worked in Padua, where he met Donatello, then creating his great equestrian statue, and learned from him not only the secrets of Florentine scientific artistry but his passion for character seen in the raw. Perhaps he should have been a sculptor: the man who taught him painting, Francesco Squarcione, criticized his painted figures for looking as if they were made of marble or stone. His famous Dead Christ, now in Milan, a daring exercise in foreshortening, looks as if it were carved with a chisel rather than painted with a brush, and his autobiographical Presentation at the Temple, showing—so legend has it—his own wife and their firstborn, though done in tempera on canvas, is as solid as granite. In Mantegna’s grand altarpieces, like the Crucifixion in the Louvre and the Agony in the Garden in London’s National Gallery, the figures seem to spring out of, and be anchored in, the rock on which they are placed. Their petrification gives them an awesome presence, as though they were harder as well as larger than life, and there is an undertone of terror and fear in some of Mantegna’s religious imagery that hints at the wrath of God. He was one of the most learned of Renaissance artists, an expert on Rome, its architecture, its decorative motifs and its armor and weaponry, and his strong historical sense led him to present his scenes from the Bible against an antique background authentic in every detail— thus distancing his superhuman figures still more from everyday fifteenth-century life.

Yet the Camera degli Sposi is an equally authentic presentation of fifteenth-century court life, as the painter actually witnessed it in the palace of the Gonzagas. The two main scenes, one outdoors (The Meeting), one indoors (The Signing of the Contract), take us straight into the world of ceremony, diplomacy, intrigue and maneuvering later described in words by Machiavelli and Castiglione. Indeed, in some ways these paintings, one in fresco, one largely in secco, tell us rather more about Renaissance courts than either of the two standard texts. There are many marvelous things in this room, including an eye or painted lunette in the ceiling, which introduces the new technique of di sotto in su, whereby figures are deliberately distorted to look natural when seen from the ground looking up—something Mantegna worked out from a typical Donatello trick. It prefigures the work of Correggio in the next generation and, indeed, the whole of the Baroque. Yet there are no tricks about the figures. These are actual faces of real people—fifteenth-century Italians of the urban, courtly breed,