Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Germany
Focus on Andrea Mantegna

Born in or around 1431 in the small town of Isola di Carturo, near Padua, Andrea Mantegna is one of the greatest and most famous Italian Renaissance painters.

This exhibition is meant to pinpoint the various sources the young Mantegna referenced for his Mark the Evangelist. Apart from his profound knowledge of the rules of central perspective, the artist relied on impulses emanating from contemporary art production in Padua, as well as on motifs and formal principles deriving from antique models. On the other hand, his pronounced sense of realism in the treatment of detail and surface texture suggests an influence of early Netherlandish art. Moreover, X-ray photography and infrared reflectography have revealed that the pictorial concept was fundamentally revised in the course of the painting’s execution. The search for the original composition also raises the question about the possible context for which this first conception of the canvas might have been intended.