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Editors: Laura Whadey Claire Hurtig Nicholas Herman Heather Diack Advisor: Alexander Nagel Editorial Committee: Guita Lamsechi Sarah Guerin Contrapposto Jenny Florence Carol Choi 2003/2004 In addition to our advisor and editorial committee, we would like to thank the following individuals and groups at the University of Toronto: Professors Marc Gotlieb and Michael Koortbojian; the Fine Art Department; Dean Michael Marrus and the School of Graduate Studies; Dean Pekka Sinervo and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; the Student Administrative Council; as well as the Graduate History of Art Student Association. Finally, we would also like to thank our authors for their contributions. About Contrapposto Table of Contents Behaving and Misbehaving: Andrea Mantegna's Devotional Images S arab Guerin Contrapposto is the annual academic student journal of the Fine Art Department of the University of Toronto. The journal To Engage the Viewer: The Relationship between Narrative endeavours to publish outstanding essays written by both graduate and the Viewer in Hellenistic Art and undergraduate students in the Department. The publication is Jennifer Kozerawski funded by various student and administrative organizations at the University, and is produced entirely by students. The 2003/2004 Fee-Male Charm School: Homoeconomics in Gerome's The edition is the third volume of Contrapposto. Snake Charmer Allan Dqyle The People of India: A Document of Colonial Abstraction S arab S tanners John Cage and the Minimal: Silence, Chance and Materialism Meg Campbell Andy Warhol: The Flaneur of Postwar America Maranatba Coulas Wavelength- Michael Snow Irmgard Emmelbainz Repetition and Reason: A Consideration ofYayoi Kusama's Art During her Prominent Years in New York Candice Hamelin Toward Reflexive Practice in the Historiography ofPersianate Art Guita Lamsecbi ISBN 0-7727-2434-2 Published September, 2004 Each essay in this publication is copyright of its respective author. Printed in Canada Behaving and Misbehaving: Andrea Mantegna's Devotional Images S arab Guerin he last chapter of Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History if the Image T Before the Era ifArt analyses the confluence between the two models that he envisions for pictures in the Western world: the religious image and Art.1 The fifteenth century saw this transformation take place, and Belting notes that the pictures of fifteenth-century Italy were Janus-faced: "People did not experience two kinds of images but images with a double face, depending on whether they were seen as receptacles of the holy or as expressions of art. This double view of the image persisted: even when applied to a single work."2 Two devotional works produced during this transitional period were Andrea Mantegna's (1430/1-1506) Berlin Virgin and Child and his Brera Lamentation if the Dead Christ. A devotional image, stated simply, is a picture that is "abbreviated in form, but plurisignate in content."3 I will illustrate how these two images existed and functioned under each 'imaginary' paradigm. First their status as devotional pictures will be probed: how do the images function in private contemplation and what was their theological development? After a close reading of the two images, I will turn to examine how Mantegna's conception of these works as 'art' changed or perhaps even hindered 1. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image bifbre the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 458-490. 2. Belting, Likeness, 458. 3. R. Berliner, "Bemerkungen zu einigen Darstellungen des Erlosers als Schmerzensamann" Das Miinster9 (1956): 97ff. Quoted in Belting 1990, 13. 7 Behaving and l\fisbehaving Sarah Guerin 8 their devotional function: how do these pictures behave as religious images, and "I slept but my heart is awake" (Song of Songs 2:5).5 Even in the sleep of infancy this how do they misbehave as art? child hints at his extraordinary nature. The child's hairline too, noticeably The size of Andrea Mantegna's Vilgin and Child in the Gemaldegalerie highlighted and accentuated, does not suggest that of an infant, but one of wisdom Berlin (43h x 32w em; Fig. 1) announces that it is a devotional image, not the type -indeed, it reminds us of the ancient appellation of the Virgin: sedes sapientiae. In to be held in one's hand, but large enough that it could be hung on a wall or her lap the Virgin holds "the New Testament counterpart to the wise king installed at a private altar. The image, painted in distemper on linen, is not securely [Solomon] of the Old Testament, the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, the Word dated, but I accept Jane Martineau's latest dating which places the image between become flesh."6 Although this seems to be an image of a simple mother and child, 1465 and 1470 due to its similarity with aspects of the Camera Picta, itself dated the details gently hint at the divine nature of the Son. c.1465-1470.4 And yet there are no halos to announce the figure's status as the Virgin The Virgin Mary is depicted as a very young woman; she is dressed in a Mary and Jesus Christ. How was the Renaissance viewer to read the image, to know simple dark blue gown, and holds her newborn son close to her breast, his head its subject? Jack Greenstein makes an argument for the Renaissance reading of an brushing against her cheek. The mother's gesture of intimacy seems absent minded, image based on Leon Battista Alberti's (1404-1472) explanation of perception in On for she gazes pensively into the distance: her mind sees and contemplates the Painting. future, her young eyes are worn with weariness and sadness. Her child, seemingly Next, intuiting [intuentes] we come to recognize [d{gnoscimus] how the many forward-facing surfaces fit together on the body; and like any other newborn, is wrapped protectively in swaddling clothes and sleeps designating these conjunctions of the surfaces in their places, the artist will rightly name the composition.7 peacefully in his mother's arms. Both mother and child are enveloped in a rich Greenstein suggests that the level of semiotic recognition of a subject is based on brocade which gives the painting warmth and a frugal sumptuousness. The figures the shape of the work rather than the specific "persons or things"depicted.s One occupy the majority of the picture plane and seem to be pressed up against this imaginary barrier. They are very close to the viewers -we could almost stretch out 4. Jane Martineau, Andrea Mantegna (l'vfilan: EJecta, 1992), 205. 5. A similar Virgin with sleeping Christ by Neri di Bicci shows Christ holding a scroll our hand to stroke the fleshy and tender fingers of Christ which have escaped from inscribed with this verse (Martineau, 205). 6. Ilene H. Forsyth, Th~Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France his swaddling clothes. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 26. 7. This is Jack Greenstein's translation, "On Alberti's 'Sign': Vision and Composition in As we sit and ponder this image, details incongruous to such a naturalistic Quattrocento Painting" Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 670. Spencer's translation of this passage reads: "Then, looking at it [the image] again, we understand that several planes of the scene begin to strike us. Those fingers we just stroked, are they in fact blessing us? observed body belong together, and here the painter drawing them in their places will say that he is making a composition." Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting. Trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1966), 68. 8. Greenstein, 696. 9 Behaving and l'vfisbehaving Sarah Guerin 1 0 could say that a sophisticated viewer of Mantegna's Berlin Madonna would read the a naturalistic idiom, all share a particular physiognomic type: "Tapered oval faces triangular configuration of the Madonna and Child and because of its similarity to with broad cheeks; straight, narrow noses; small mouths; large [almond shaped] the Verona Madonna, that it is of the same subject.9 Because of this 'shape eyes."1 4 Mantegna's Berlin Madonna possesses all of these features- features that recognition,' Renaissance artists did not "feel compelled to reproduce these we recognize from traditional Byzantine icons or from Venetian paintings in the recognizable prototypes in their works" and were, therefore, free to "invent the manieragrecaThus, contraty to Greenstein's theory, which identified the spatial likenesses of persons they depicted."10 \'Vhen speaking of Mantegna's Berlin configuration of the image as the signifier of a 'Madonna and Child,' and which :Madonna Greenstein notes that "the portrayal is so intimate and detailed that it is leaves the artist free to use the likeness of a model for the painting, Maguire and tempting to suggest that Mantegna employed a model, or cast someone known to Goffen reveal that Mantegna continued to use the Byzantine method of the patron in the role of the Virgin."ll physiognomic identification, even when using a naturalistic idiom. The Madonna is To think in such terms is to wear the blinders of modernism. Greenstein a recognizable individual, as visually literate Italians could not have mistaken the 15 and modern viewers are, in a sense, blinded by the naturalism and emotional Virgin Mary's characteristic features for those of 'some model.' The painting is realism of Mantegna's painting. Because they feel that this woman is recognizable, both a successful religious image and work of art. they assume that she must have been a model. Opposed to Greenstein's program Henk van Os notes that although Mantegna's Berlin Madonna is of surface recognition is Henry Maguire's outline of the Byzantine pattern of superficially like the Eleousa Madonna, the "radical individualization of stereotypes" pictorial recognition which he discusses in his book, The icons and their bodies.

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