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Missing Mantegna at the Louvre

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Now that most of the annual ‘10 Best’ art lists from 2008 have trickled in from assorted newspapers and magazines, I’d like to add a slight diversion: The Show I’d Most Like to Have Seen in 2008 but Didn’t.

And the winner, if that’s the right word, is ‘Mantegna’ at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

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Andrea Mantegna (1431?-1506) was the Italian Renaissance painter from Padua who also worked extensively in nearby Mantua. He holds a special place for many because of a single, astonishingly odd painting. His 1490 ‘Dead Christ,’ a treasure of the Brera Museum in Milan, shows the body laid out on a slab, feet first: The crucified soles of the feet are what greet your gaze first, complete with gruesome nail holes. (You can see the painting by scrolling down here.) It’s a startling image of humility. And Mantegna’s radical foreshortening of the body -- aside from being a perspective tour de force -- creates a sense of intense physical compression that underscores the body’s fleshy corporeality. In this picture, death is not an abstraction; it’s a physical mortification.

What I’ve always wondered, though, and what I assume a large survey like the Louvre’s would help to answer, is the relationship between Mantegna’s paintings and ancient and medieval carved sculpture.

The ‘Dead Christ’ looks like a stone funerary sculpture of a body laid out atop a tomb, of the kind that proliferated in churches and royal catacombs throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. (The painting ironically breathes life into stone.) And his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (circa 1495-1505) from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, above, is similarly sculptural. The six figures are pressed into a shallow, even claustrophobic space, as if in imitation of a carved relief on an ancient marble sarcophagus or plaque.

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Yet each figure in the ‘Adoration’ is also a fully formed person -- and individual personality -- occupying fully formed space. As a painting innovation, basing a realist depiction on antique sculpture is unusual. It’s as if Mantegna decided to skip over the aesthetically stylized Middle Ages to find ancient Roman prototypes for depicting the flesh-and-blood world around him -- a distinctive Renaissance twist.

I suppose there’s still time to find out if that’s what Mantegna was up to. The Louvre’s exhibition is on view through Jan. 5 -- which, speaking of the Getty’s ‘Magi,’ is just in time for Epiphany.

-- Christopher Knight

Above: ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (circa 1495-1505). Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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