TO Padua rush everywhere to understand what is happening, To follow the wake of fire lit by Andrea Mantegnaborn in Isola di Carturo (now Isola Mantegna, in Piazzola sul Brenta) in 1431, and died in Mantua in 1506.
In the full period from Paduan, while working at the Holived Chapel, In about 1455, Mantegna painted the first of the two Prayers in the gardenkept on the National Gallery of London. Mantegna interprets the episode of the garden of olive trees, in which Jesus suffers his extreme solitude And the wait for the arrest, and sets it in a strongly mountain landscape, thus meaning to follow the lesson of the Gospel of Luca, who speaks of “Monte degli Ulivi”.
The other two synoptic gospels, that of Marco and that of Matteo, on the other hand, speak of A “village” called Gethsemani. But Mantegna explicit in his painting also the presence of a cityindeed precisely in this relationship between nature and the city lies the singularity of this painting.
High mountains (perhaps the Dolomites that Mantegna had to have well in mind) affect an ideal cityfortified, in which medieval elements intertwine with Roman columns and artifacts, in a completely new synthesis. The landscape for Mantegna is never of nature alone, but always intertwined with the vestiges of ancient civilizations, the Roman one in particular, who had left important finds in Verona, where the painter had lived.
Mantegna recreates an abstract and at the same time very real city, set in a stony mountainjust revived by shrubs and bunnies, in which they are, like sculptures extracted from the stone, the characters.
Andrea Mantegna: “Prayer in the garden”, about 145-56 (© The National Gallery, London).
Christ has the vision of angelshere too, welcoming Luca’s version: “Then an angel appeared to him from heaven to comfort him”. The angels, in reality not very comforting, bring the symbols of the passion, the column of the martyrdom, the cross, the spear with which the cost will be pierced. And addresses his prayer to his father: «Father, if you want, remove this chalice from me! However, mine is not done, but your will ».
It is therefore not a neutral space, the Gethsemane of Mantegna, but a space that builds the drama of Jesus in turn. Mantegna makes use of the two mountainous peaks to show the arrival of the “empire of darkness” (again Luca). AND It makes the weight of those mountains felt, as if they were a higher force The civilization and the same characters of the story dominates: we see Judas incede with the soldiers, we see the apostles asleep, but the mountain landscape, with those two peaks, is dominant.
The nature of Mantegna
Only Jesus competes with the deaf nature, kneeling on a chipped rock Which seems the base of a Roman statue, which separates it from the rest of the world, erages it, announcing the Mount of Golgotha. The mountain takes on the same function that we can find in the fourteenth scene of the cycle of frescoes that Giotto dedicates to San Francesco in the upper Basilica of Assisi, that of the miracle of water.
Here, as in Assisi, the mountain represents that excess that escapes man, who prepares the miracle of death and resurrection, and brings closer to heaven. But in Mantegna the composition is enriched with a more complex architectural element, which dialogues with nature and makes its presence felt. Nature enters history, Roman history, which is reborn in the Venetian countryside. Mantegna is precisely this Renaissance of Roman civilization. But Renaissance is also finding a new balance with nature.
The symbolism is very rich, in this painting: The Pellicano is the figure of the sacrifice of Christ, the vulture on the dry branches preludes death, the rabbits disseminated on the streets are the emblem of life that is renewed. Is in Mantegna a lenticular precision in defining details rocks, trees, animals, despite the extraordinary ability of compositional synthesis.
We can compare this painting by Mantegna with the coeval table, of a similar subject, by Giovanni Bellinialso to National Gallery of London. The difference is important: the rock is a kneeler, almost a design object, softer and tied. Everything is more sweetened. Jesus, in a pose of three quarters, is totally immersed in nature, it is part of a harmonious one.
Mantegna and Bellini
There is Judah who runs with the soldiers, there are the apostles won by sleep, a distant architecture, a bell tower, on the left, and a city on the right appear, placed on two green hills. Everything breathes at the same rhythm, men, nature, civilization. Or rather, Nature in Bellini envelops everything, and the rock adapts to this movement of sinuous waltz.
Giovanni Bellini’s Renaissance is the full harmony of man and nature. Andrea Mantegna’s Renaissance is a new, difficult balance, between nature and history.
All articles by Vittorio Sgarbi
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