Andrea Mantegna : Making Art (History)

Résumé En

The fifteenth century Italian peinter Andrea Mantegna is widely regarded as one of the most virtuosic and conceptually ambitious artists of the European tradition. Yet his place in the history of art has been a constant challenge to a teological history of style that has prevailed - in the form of the monograph or exhibition - since Giorgio Vasari. Andrea Mantegna : Making Art (History) features a collection of readings that reveal Mantegna as challenging the parameters of art history in the demands it makes upon historical interpretation, and which explore the artist's potentially transformative impact on the study of early Renaissance. Essays on the artist's devotional painting's, two of his monumental mural projects (The Camera Picta and Ovetari Chapel), signing practices, self-portraiture, and the meta-artistic character of his "stony" style provide a complement as well as an alternative to the narrowly iconographic tradition, concerned primarily with textual sources. Collectively, the essays serve to enrich the narrow and restrictive conceptions of the relationship of the text with new models positionned at the confluence of ancient, Renaissance and modern poetics. With its array of approaches and methodologies, Andrea Mantegna : Making Art (History) offers striking new insights into the life and works of one of the true definiting geniuses of the early Renaissance.