Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History)

The 15th–century Italian painter Andrea Mantegna is widely regarded as one of the most virtuosic and conceptually ambitious artists of the European tradition. Yet his place in the history of art has been a constant challenge to a teleological history of style that has prevailed—in the form of the monograph or exhibition—since Giorgio Vasari. Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History) features a collection of readings that reveal Mantegna as challenging the parameters of art history in the demands it makes upon historical interpretation and explore the artist’s potentially transformative impact on the study of the early Renaissance. Essays on the artist’s devotional paintings, two of his monumental mural projects (Camera Picta and Ovetari Chapel), signing practices, self–portraiture, and the meta–artistic character of his  “stony” style provide a complement as well as an alternative to the narrowly iconographic tradition, concerned primarily with textual sources. Collectively, essays serve to enrich the narrow and restrictive conceptions of the relationship of a text with new models positioned at the confluence of ancient, Renaissance, and modern poetics. With its array of approaches and methodologies, Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History) offers striking new insights into the life and works of one of the true defining geniuses of the early Renaissance.

Stephen J. Campbell is a member of the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Art in Italy 1400–1600 , co–authored with Michael Cole (2011). Jérémie Koering is a Research Associate at the Centre André Chastel. His books include Léonard de Vinci (2007) and Le prince en représentation (2013).