Andrea Mantegna, Camera Picta

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506) was the leading painter in northern Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century. In 1459, he officially accepted Lodovico Gonzaga’s offer of a monthly salary of fifteen ducats, plus room and board for his family, for the position of court artist in Mantua. In 1465, he began his famous frescoes in the Camera Picta (literally “painted room”) in the Ducal Palace. In contrast to Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi in the Medici Palace, Mantegna’s frescoes depict the patron’s family in the private space of their court rather than as figures in a biblical scene. Two entire walls are illusionistically dissolved as the painted architecture merges with the actual architecture of the room.

The entrance wall depicts pages with horses and hunting dogs, a group of putti carrying an inscription over the door, and Lodovico’s son , Francesco, to the right of the door. Francesco is shown as a cardinal, a recent and advantageous appointment for the Gonzaga family. With him is his father in white stockings and a gray tunic, and other important political figures. Illusionistic details abound – for example, the blue curtain, the painted pilasters, and the dogs’ feet projecting onto the dado (lower part of the wall).

Over the fireplace, in a fictive loggia, Lodovico and his wife are grouped with their immediate family, advisers, and a female dwarf. Courtiers are coming down and going up a flight of stairs, and one, at the far left, gives Lodovico a message, indicating the marquis’s involvement in affairs of state. Lodovico’s combined role as paterfamilias, ruler, and condottierre (soldier) is reflected in the very nature of the Camera. It served as a kind of state bedroom, both a private family setting and a place where official visitors were received and documents were signed.

The humorous oculus at the center of the ceiling consists of a foreshortened balustrade opening up to the sky. Groups of women gaze over the top of the balustrade, on which a peacock perches and a pot of plants is precariously held in place by a wooden bar. Some of the putti have suffered the consequences of their curiosity and gotten their heads stuck in the balustrade. One is about to drop an apple, a witty counterpoint to one of the children over the fireplace who also holds an apple. In this detail, Mantegna plays with the apple’s role in the Fall of Man, here in relation to the role of the Camera as a bedroom. By emphasizing the potential fall of the apple itself, Mantegna’s visual pun conflates notions of moral and psychological “falling” with the pull of gravity. By the extreme di sotto in su (from below looking up, or “worm’s eye view”) viewpoint, he also invites visitors to the Camera to look up and participate in the joke.^[1]