Word: mantegna
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...National Gallery's show, directed by a trio of experts (Konrad Oberhuber, Jay Levenson and Jacquelyn Sheehan), brings together some 200 examples, ranging from masterpieces like Andrea Mantegna's Entombment of Christ to a cheery bit of erotica (involving a girl who bears a startling resemblance to Alice in Wonderland) by an anonymous North Italian artist of the late 15th century. This is the kind of thing major museums ought to be about, when they are not distracted by show biz and self-puffery. One sees the print discovering its own nature and destiny as copper engraving changed...
...paper onto the metal and so invent the copperplate engraving, seems to have been a Florentine goldsmith named Maso Finiguerra (1426-64). The technique suited its period. It demanded tough, precise outline drawing and responded to absolute clarity of form. Hence it was ideal for a precisionist like Mantegna, whose few engravings are almost mineral in their sharpness. Not even the drapery on his figures was soft; with deep cuts and cracking angles, it might have been carved from obsidian...
...drawing in importance. Nevertheless, a wide range of artists (Fra Angelico, Jacopo de' Barbari, Francesco Rosselli) did multiply their images on copper, so that Italian prototypes and compositions filtered increasingly through to northern Europe; in the mid-17th century, Rembrandt was still extracting poses and situations from prints Mantegna and others had made 200 years before...
...like the Van Eycks and Hugo van der Goes. What fascinated Dürer was Italian humanism and all that flowed from the discovery of classical antiquity. He felt that his destiny was to introduce these new ideas to the North. He had informed himself from scraps, mainly engravings after Mantegna and his imitators that he had seen and copied in Wolgemut's Nuremberg studio. Dürer was already a virtuoso draftsman; but there was nobody alive in Germany against whom he could test himself...
...working and something was coming then, something was coming out of this one then..." Or if an African mask were adjacent to Gertrude's Cubist-like portrait, or if Leo were expressing his excitement over Cezanne when he had really gone to Italy to study Italian painters: Mantegna for Leo was "a sort of Cezanne precursor with the color running all through...