Missing Mantegna at the Louvre

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Now that most of the annual ‘10 Best’ art lists from 2008 have trickled in from assorted newspapers and magazines, I’d like to add a slight diversion: The Show I’d Most Like to Have Seen in 2008 but Didn’t.

And the winner, if that’s the right word, is ‘Mantegna’ at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Andrea Mantegna (1431?-1506) was the Italian Renaissance painter from Padua who also worked extensively in nearby Mantua. He holds a special place for many because of a single, astonishingly odd painting. His 1490 ‘Dead Christ,’ a treasure of the Brera Museum in Milan, shows the body laid out on a slab, feet first: The crucified soles of the feet are what greet your gaze first, complete with gruesome nail holes. (You can see the painting by scrolling down here.) It’s a startling image of humility. And Mantegna’s radical foreshortening of the body -- aside from being a perspective tour de force -- creates a sense of intense physical compression that underscores the body’s fleshy corporeality. In this picture, death is not an abstraction; it’s a physical mortification.

What I’ve always wondered, though, and what I assume a large survey like the Louvre’s would help to answer, is the relationship between Mantegna’s paintings and ancient and medieval carved sculpture.

The ‘Dead Christ’ looks like a stone funerary sculpture of a body laid out atop a tomb, of the kind that proliferated in churches and royal catacombs throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. (The painting ironically breathes life into stone.) And his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (circa 1495-1505) from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, above, is similarly sculptural. The six figures are pressed into a shallow, even claustrophobic space, as if in imitation of a carved relief on an ancient marble sarcophagus or plaque.

Yet each figure in the ‘Adoration’ is also a fully formed person -- and individual personality -- occupying fully formed space. As a painting innovation, basing a realist depiction on antique sculpture is unusual. It’s as if Mantegna decided to skip over the aesthetically stylized Middle Ages to find ancient Roman prototypes for depicting the flesh-and-blood world around him -- a distinctive Renaissance twist.

I suppose there’s still time to find out if that’s what Mantegna was up to. The Louvre’s exhibition is on view through Jan. 5 -- which, speaking of the Getty’s ‘Magi,’ is just in time for Epiphany.

-- Christopher Knight

Above: ‘Adoration of the Magi’ (circa 1495-1505). Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles