A title that combines the name of Andrea Mantegna with the acts of making art and art history sets a high standard of keen observation and heightened sensibility for stylistic texture and visual arguments to match the artist’s extraordinary level of historical and medial self-consciousness as embodied in his painterly practice. To meet such standard, Stephen J. Campbell and Jérémie Koering let the voice of the much-missed Daniel Arasse speak as vividly as those of contemporary scholars. Referring back to the 2011 RSA conference panels in Montreal and a special issue of Art History, this volume adds another text from the past: Roberto Longhi’s “Pictorial Letter” to Giuseppe Fiocco. The edition does for the reader what Mantegna does for the viewer: it assesses our own place in the long procession of ages, styles, and objects through acts of definition, appropriation, and ironic distance. The excellent quality of images is sustained throughout the book, even manifesting, on the cover, splendid white rabbits from the Vienna Saint Sebastian.
The authors circle around the theme of pictorial poetics as “a matter of pictorial organization, of a visual play between conventions and inventions, of a dialogue between transparency and opacity—that is, between a work’s ostensible subject and its elaboration” (15), according to editors Campbell and Koering, introducing their “Search of Mantegna’s Poetics.” The volume aims to address metarepresentation, “the entire ensemble of pictorial effects” (9) through which meaning is produced, and the hermeneutics of style. The project asks for a reconsideration of Mantegna’s visual poetics as processes and results: mimesis, metaphor, metonomy, and above all, metamorphosis.
Klaus Krüger’s revised English version of a central chapter from Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren (2001) focuses on pictorial fiction as medium in the late medieval Christian tradition of framing effects for empathic responses, keeping the image or the icon between “withholding” and “making present.” From Arasse we have the first English version of his classical text on Mantegna signatures, a milestone in studies of Renaissance self-referentiality. Guillaume Cassegrain revisits with “Mantegna the Grammarian” important contributions to critical theory by Pierre Francastel and Felix Thürlemann. Koering presents Gonzaga’s famous camera in Mantua as a metadiscourse on art’s origins, focusing on the vegetal self-portrait, the inscription’s “absoluvit,” and the date in marble as traces of Mantegna’s comments on the porous borders between nature and art. Campbell’s analysis of that same room emphasizes its phenomenological impact and its forms of portraiture and perspective in the context of a poetical dialectic. For Campbell, Mantegna’s poetics of pathos and spiriti combine to form pictura in a decidedly non-Albertian vision. Andreas Hauser, after his important Mantegna essays in German, here discusses masks and petrifications as Medusan iconologies visualizing the body-soul problem. Andrea Bolland’s “Artifice and Stability in Late Mantegna” revisits humanistic literature through simulated relief sculptures as sites of moral and historiographical investigations. Francis Fletcher presents the fictive bronze reliefs of Judith and Dido (Montreal) and their embedded discourses of the paragone and questione della lingua. And finally, Longhi’s letter offers his narrative of Mantegna as producing a vital response to antiquity, seeing the Renaissance as a process of modernization (with Mantegna on the wrong side of that modernity). Longhi’s position, presented as the last word in a reversal of historical chronologies, by contrast brings into relief the current state of Mantegna studies.
The collection is thereby also an anthology or an album of friends of Mantegna, each inscribing their note of fondness in their personal calligraphy, amounting to the production of an implicit history of art history. The family tree of authors turned upside down, the edition suggests that Longhi’s contribution should be read today only after having gone through the recent propositions. In such manner, old and new voices converse with former and subsequent generations in their shared love for the works themselves. Those works speak through arbitrary passages of time just as clearly as the modern and contemporary authors do, forming a well-balanced edition. Reversing the chronology of the critics and makers one more time for the sake of testing its coherence with material and master, it is not hard to imagine that Mantegna would have considered Making Art (History) an enjoyable read.
