Andrea Mantegna - Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images (Relié)

No other artist before him could boast a celebrity like that of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), whose career reads like an archetype of Renaissance social ascent. Half a millennium later Mantegna is well-remembered ; yet while his importance in any account of a Western Tradition of painting has long been beyond dispute, it has been and remains under-examined and misunderstood. In this provocative re-assessment, based on his Betty Allison Rand lectures at the University of North Carolina 2017, Stephen J.
Campbell shows that Mantegna has served the function of illustrating early Renaissance painting, whether the principles of a "humanist theory of art" as prescribed in the De pictura of Alberti, with its elaboration of perspective techniques, or the preoccupation with antiquity and its reconstruction. While he is rightly regarded a crucial nexus of interaction between the world of the artisan, of the court, and of intellectual life, Mantegna's importance is still perceived to lie in an early formulation of what is called the "classical tradition," destined to be surpassed after his death by Raphael and his followers.
Campbell argues that the place of normativity or typicality that Mantegna occupies in the History of Art – "Early Renaissance artist," "artist as antiquarian," "Albertian perspectivist," has kept from view the more radical potential of his work for a re-description of early Renaissance painting. In particular, this study of the artist's major works re-open the questions of "humanist art," of the relationship between painting and intellectual life, of image-making as a form of discourse that bears a far from passive or ancillary relationship to poetry, history, or rhetoric.
Mantegna's work is shown to challenge and complicate prevailing understandings of the way works of art address their beholders and construct their spatial milieu, of the materiality of painting and the relationship of painting and writing, and the volatile ideologies of classical antiquity as a component of Renaissance painting.