26. Andrea Mantegna. Camera Picta, north wall, showing Ludovico Gonzaga and his court. Fresco and tempera. Palazzo Ducale, Mantua
The Camera Picta Between 1465 and 1474 Mantegna undertook for the marchese Ludovico Gonzaga the decoration of a room that served both as a bedroom and audience chamber, the so-called Camera Picta (Painted Room), later called the Camera degli Sposi (Bridal Chamber), in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (fig. 25). Despite its modest dimensions (26 ½ feet square), the room is one of the defining works of Renaissance art, for in it Mantegna reconceived the notion of court portraiture. He did this by organizing the portraits around two narrative events. Although scholars have attempted to relate these events to real historical incidents, what they are trying to decipher is nothing less than the imagination of the artist. For these are imaginary encounters.There is a parallel in the scholarship surrounding Velázquez’s great portrait of the Infanta Margarita and her maids: Las Meninas. As in that masterpiece, so in Mantegna’s depiction we can identify all of the main characters, including the dog taking his rest beneath his master’s chair (his name is Rubino, or Red), but we still cannot explicate the particular event it shows. Velázquez seems to have been inviting the viewer to participate in an informal moment of court life, and so does Mantegna.
Unlike the situation in the Ovetari Chapel, where the viewer stands below and outside the scene, in the Camera Picta Mantegna sought an interactive relationship with visitors to the room, which he transformed into a fictive pavilion raised on a low, marble-encrusted wall. On two of the walls simulated heavy brocade curtains have been drawn back to reveal the Gonzaga court. On the north wall, neatly conceived to incorporate the actual fireplace, the view looks out toward a walled garden; on the west wall is an open landscape. On the two remaining walls the heavy brocade curtains have been drawn shut. Mantegna has in effect cleverly adapted the conceit of the San Zeno altarpiece, in which the viewer-worshiper looks through the tripartite opening of the frame at the Virgin and her attendants holding court in a Roman-style pavilion surrounded by a rose hedge. In the Camera Picta he puts us inside the pavilion, in the position of the Virgin, if you will, looking out. It is a remarkable demonstration of the flexibility and ingenuity of Mantegna’s mind: a mind that conceives of itself as inhabiting the very fictions it generates. And he invites us to do likewise: to enter into his fictions. By imagining the position and experience of the viewer, he redefined the very character of painting.
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