(lighthearted music)
Female Voiceover: Let's talk about this
frescoed room by Andrea Mantegna.
Male Voiceover: First a little background information.
Mantenga was active in Northern Italy,
first in Padua, also Ferrara, and around the Veneto in the middle of the 1400s.
Then, in 1460, he's appointed by
the Marquis of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga,
to be the court artist of the Court of Mantua,
so he moves there in the 1460s.
Female Voiceover: It's really important to recognize
that what's happening in Mantua
is going to be really different
than what's happening in Florence.
Male Voiceover: Yeah, in other kinds of cities,
Mantua, at this time, is a court; it's ruled by a marquis,
which is a step below a duke, the Gonzaga family
who'd been in control for quite a while
are the single dominant rulers of the city.
It's very different from a situation, as you pointed out,
Florence, or Venice, which are republics.
So, Mantegna comes and he begins working
on this project, which is called the Camera Picta,
or the Camera degli Sposi, which-
Female Voiceover: Camera just means
Male Voiceover: Room.
Male Voiceover: Camera Picta means the 'painted room'.
One thing to point out is that besides the door frame,
and the mantle piece and some architectural features
like these brackets at the bottom of the vault,
everything that we're looking at is paint.
Female Voiceover: It's just amazing to me that it's all paint.
Male Voiceover: It's completely frescoed.
All of the things that look like architectural decoration,
and ornaments, and moldings, Female Voiceover: And molding.
all of this is fresco.
Female Voiceover: He made it look
as though the walls are actually open.
Male Voiceover: We have the ceiling that's decorated
with these architectural and sculptural forms,
and then it has an oculus, or this open hole
at the center of the ceiling that we'll take a look at, all painted,
and painted very, very naturalisticly
and with the careful attention to perspective,
as if you are seeing 3-dimensional objects from below
or on the walls and that makes it illusionistic, as if it's really there.
Female Voiceover: And we're, what, about 40 or 50 years
after the death of Masaccio, so it really
in that full swing of the early Renaissance,
and humanism, the [unintelligible] discovery of classical antiquity.
Male Voiceover: That's right, and Mantegna was a big part of that.
Speaking of classical antiquity, and we can start on the ceiling,
and what we see is this oculus,
and then surrounding it is this architectural
and sculptural ornamentation that's extremely classisizing
in terms of the molding and the details
in the ribbons and the garlands,
and the putti, Female Voiceover: And the putti.
and what they're holding are fictive reliefs
of the first eight ancient Roman emperors;
and so, also [within] the subject matter,
the ceiling is extremely classical.
What's important to point out is that,
we talk a lot about classical antiquity in the Renaissance,
and the revival of antiquity, but it's important to remember
that different types of cities drew
from different types of classical antiquity,
and what we're looking at here
with these portraits of the emperors,
is an imperial classical antiquity,
which is entirely appropriate for a court city like Mantua
that's ruled by a marquis or any other city ruled by a duke.
But this kind of imagery would have been
completely inappropriate in a place like Florence.
Private citizens in a republic would not have been
allowed to decorate, Female Voiceover: (laughs)
or ruin their house with Roman emperors.
Female Voiceover: No, Florence looked back
to the period of ancient Rome when it was a republic.
Male Voiceover: So, it's important to remember
that for the people in the Renaissance,
they were able to distinguish between different types
of classical antiquity, and pick what was most relevant to them.
Below that, again, we see this open space,
and on the walls are frescoes of the Marquis Ludovico
and his everyday life scenes in what supposedly
Mantuan territory scenes from his activities.
Here we see Ludovico meeting with his son, the cardinal.
In the landscape there's some putti
that are standing up on top of the door holding an inscription,
and then on this wall we see Ludovico
and his wife and his family and his favorite dog
and the court little person all sitting around
while he receives a message from an adviser on the far left.
Then, coming up the stairs on the right
are some visitors who are coming to greet him,
and that might be related to the function of this room,
which might have been a kind of ceremonial greeting space.
You see this extremely naturalistic,
illusionistic painting that creates
the fiction of architectural spaces.
Look at how the curtain seems to be pulled forward
and in front of the column, so sometimes it's really hard
to distinguish between what's real and what's not.
Female Voiceover: There's a lot of fun clearly
in playing with those boundaries and using perspective
to fool the eye.
Male Voiceover: Right, because you are looking
slightly up at these figures, they're standing on top of the fireplace,
and notice that you actually do look up at them.
You can see slightly up into the bottom of their tunics,
so you don't see the top surfaces of the stairs
or the floor that they're standing on;
so, Mantegna's painting it as if
you're really seeing them elevated in that position.
This is a part that's intentionally fun and humorous.
This is the oculus, this opening.
Oculus means eye in Latin.
Female Voiceover: That's not a real opening.
Male Voiceover: Not a real opening;
it's just painted from this Di sotto in su, from below, radical perspective.
So, we see everything very foreshortened,
the balustade, this railing that circles the oculus.
The putti that are standing here,
you seem them very foreshortened from below.
Here's a peacock that we see from below.
You see several servants, including an African one,
standing around and they're looking down and they're laughing.
If you look very carefully, you'll notice
that one of these women has her hand on this pole
that's supporting this pot with a plant in it;
and the suggestion, I think, is that
she's about to pull that pole away
and that potted plant is going to fall right on your head.
So, that's the joke; you're standing there looking up
with your mouth hanging open, and suddenly you realize
that there's the joke, the illusion,
of these objects that are going to fall on you.
Female Voiceover: In fact, there are other figures
who look like they could drop things on us
Male Voiceover: Out of their hands, or-
other parts of their body.
Male Voiceover: Right, because look at these putti,
not wearing diapers with their little rear ends sticking out,
or the front of them facing us,
and so there may be other things falling on you, too.
On the one hand, this room gives us
a serious subject matter of the marquis as a ruler of his domain,
with this serious, imperial, classisizing imagery
of the ancient Roman emperors on the ceiling,
but at the same time, in a kind of marginal location,
above your head, what you might not see right away,
there's this puerile, humorous joking quality
that lightens the atmosphere a little bit.
(lighthearted music)