Andrea Mantegna (Än-drä-ä Män-tān-yä), 1431–1506

JANTEGNA was born probably at Padua, and early became the foster son and pupil of Squarcione. This teacher-artist was among the first to apply in modern painting the newly discovered remains and models of classic art, especially

While with Squarcione, Mantegna was closely associated with the two younger Bellini, whose sister he married. He painted easel pictures and the famous fresco in the chapel of the Eremitani in Padua, and worked later two years in the Vatican at Rome, and much elsewhere in other cities. In 1466 he settled in Padua, where he spent most of his remaining life.

Mantegna is characterized by his earnest, intense, almost severe style. His figures are statuelike in pose, a little stiff, yet with a benignity and a faithful truth to nature, a depth of feeling and a calm power, a classic stateliness, which with his high technical excellence, his careful attention to details of drapery, and harmony of color, have won for him a lofty place in art. He was also a good engraver.

The knightly St. George, slayer of the dragons of evil which infest earth, clad in full armor, which is yet intact, though his broken lance shows that the contest has been arduous, stands calm, triumphant, yet not exultant over his vanquished foe. The details of the armor of the period are carefully wrought out.

The English soldiers in the first crusade chose St. George as their patron, and he has since been regarded as the guardian saint of England.

This picture is in the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.

A

LL the world agrees to see in Leonardo a most striking example of the universal genius. Endowed with a nature as strongly scientific as it was artistic, he was essentially a physicist and engineer, in the infancy of that group of sciences and arts, and his painting was only one of several

arts pursued as a side issue.

While we wonder at his many-sided attainments in scientific fields, yet his chief service to the world lies in the few pictures he took time to paint, and the influence which these and his teachings have exercised.

In the Louvre are his principal easel pictures. The "Virgin of the Rocks" mirrors, as do all the others, the mysterious and fathomless nature of the man, the subject of endless speculation and research. The features of the Virgin and of the attendant angel are filled with the subtle meanings and suggestions, which in Leonardo's faces baffle the inquiry which they court.

Read, if you can, the profound mysterious calm these faces express. are laden with a precocious wisdom. in its weird light, is full of dread, and we may contrast the wild wastes of primeval earth, which no loving culture has subdued, with the deep intelligence and prophetic contemplation which shines through these faces, Heaven's promise to the World.

emotions and thoughts which in their Even the Christ child and the St. John The savage background of naked rocks,

In the National Gallery in London is a replica of this picture, with slight variations.