Art: A Genius Obsessed By Stone

Andrea Mantegna has never been easy to approach, alive or dead. The "rock- born giant," as Bernard Berenson called him, with his dedication to archaeology and his obsession with empirical vision, was one of the quintessential artists of the early Italian Renaissance. He was innovative, flinty and tough-minded, without an iota of sentiment.

This son of a Paduan carpenter, who rose to become the cynosure of every humanist eye in northern Italy, once sent a gang of thugs to bash up a printer who fell foul of him, and then had the poor man denounced for sodomy -- a crime that, in 15th century Venice, carried the death penalty. Mantegna could also be sardonic and disrespectful to tardy patrons, up to and including the Pope himself. When Innocent VIII hired him to decorate the chapel of the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican, he was puzzled to see, tacked onto allegorical roundels of the Seven Virtues, an eighth that held the sketched-in figure of an old woman. What did she signify? asked the Pontiff. "Ingratitude," snapped Mantegna, who had not yet been paid.

You must go to his work; most of it cannot come to you -- not the murals and not many of the paintings either, most of which are now considered too frail to travel. Neither the St. Luke Altarpiece nor The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, that unsurpassably bitter and poignant image of the corpse on the stone slab, can leave the Brera in Milan, and the Louvre will never lend the Madonna della Vittoria to another museum.

Consequently there is a lengthy list of major paintings that are not included in "Andrea Mantegna," the show of more than 130 works by him and others that will be at the Royal Academy of Arts in London through early April before moving to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in May. But this should deter no one -- any chance to see a number of Mantegnas together ought to be grabbed, and this show is more a scholarly one than a spectacle, with catalog essays that break new ground in Mantegna research.

The word classicist today suggests pedantry. To the best minds of the Italian Renaissance it meant discovery and impassioned curiosity. We are too hobbled by provincialism in time to be able to goad ourselves into the excitement with which Mantegna and other Italian artists, architects and writers of the 15th century confronted the Antique: a buried civilization, an Atlantis below the hills and vineyards. What did it mean when Mantegna, in the early autumn of 1464, took off with two friends on a boat decked with carpets and laurel branches, punting around Lake Garda, twangling on the lute and looking for Roman ruins? This search for "such delightful places and such venerable ancient monuments," as one of them later wrote, was a serious idyll, a way back into the past.

To be esteemed as a painter was to be compared with lost and mythic artists: Parrhasios, Zeuxis and Apelles. Mantegna's taste for emblems and learned allegory -- the mark of superior imagination among Italian humanists -- pervades the work he did at Isabella d'Este's prompting, such as the fantastically elaborate scene of Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue.