Italy celebrates the fifth centennial of the death of Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna: Lamentation over the dead Christ

The Italian cities of Padua, Verona and Mantua celebrate the fifth centennial of the death of the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) with three great exhibitions dedicated to the life and works of the Quattrocento master in the Eremitami Museum (Padua), Palazzo della Gran Guardia (Verona) and Palazzo Te (Mantua). The exhibition will be open to the public from September 17 th, 2006 until January 14 th , 2007.

The 467 works exhibited (64 by Mantegna), distributed between the three cities, will try to offer not only a complete vision of the artist’s oeuvre, but a suggestive recreation of the rich Italian artistic atmosphere of the time.

ABOUT ANDREA MANTEGNA

A painter, sketcher, engraver, master of the tempera, the frescoes, and the perspective. a genius. Andrea Mantegna (Isola di Carturo, c.1431 – Mantova, 1506) is one of those essential figures in the development of the European Art that placed the Italian Quattrocento among the most glorious periods of the Western Art. His vigorous, almost sculptoric style; his interest for the Antiquity, and his mastery of the perspective were admired by his contemporaries, which provided him important orders. In fact, Marquis Ludovico Gonzaga named him his court painter.

For Gonzaga Mantegna painted some of his more famous works, like the Death of the Virgin (c.1461), now in the Prado Museum ; or the Virgin of the Victory (1496) in the Louvre. His most famous work is perhaps the Dead Christ (c.1480) in the Pinacoteca Brera of Milan , with a complex mastery and alteration of the perspective, in which Mantegna slightly increases the size of the head of Christ.

In January 2003, his work Descent into Limbo , the only painting by Mantegna still in private hands was sold in a Sotheby’s auction for more than $28 million.