Excerpt from The Work of Andrea Mantegna: Reproduced in Two Hundred Illustrations, With a Biographical Introduction What was the condition of art in North Italy at the time Man tegna entered the field? Let us inquire into it a little. In Venice, art, without abruptly breaking with tradition, had gradually weak ened and softened the severities of Byzantine forms. The decorative motif prevailed, but the compositions still remained archaic. The figures were nerveless and nice; the color-play neat and cloying in the sweetness of its effects. Over it all hung the pall of an unhealthy life without the slightest indication of serious thought. Even Pisa nello and Gentile da Fabriano were also thus tainted. Their remark able sense for dainty coloring and play of lines results in a kind of advanced miniature painting. They evince no large ideas or big thoughts. The Renaissance in art was to come, not from Venice, but from Florence and Padua, the city of learning. Centuries before, the greatest of the Florentines, Giotto, had come and put a new life into North Italian art; in Padua, Altichieri and Antelami had made that city famous with their frescoes. In the Quattrocento, again, masters like Paolo Uccello, Fra Filippo Lippi and Andrea Castagno, who had spent most of their working lives in Venice, came finally to Padua. It was their masterpieces, and not the inferior works of the Venetians, which inspired and illuminated Mantegna, and made possible the revelation he was to give. They gave him the taste for a robust and realistic interpretation of nature, and they inspired him also with a high and serious sense of the artist's work. These great-minded men chose big problems - the study of nature and its representation in artistic forms. Mantegna set himself the same problems. The pale, sweet, and insipid sentimentality of the Venetian school meant nothing to him. He desired clarity of idea and clarity of expression, and he gave his life to obtaining these. He wanted, above all, to be livingly true, and with this purpose he worked to higher and higher achievements. This devotion and mas terful self-sacrifice are the marks of genius which will give every thing so that it may realize itself in the end. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.