(lighthearted music) Female Voiceover: Let's talk about this frescoed room by Andrea Mantegna. Male Voiceover: First a
little background information. Mantenga was active in Northern Italy, first in Padua, also Ferrara, and around
the Veneto in the middle of the 1400s. Then, in 1460, he's appointed by the Marquis of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga, to be the court artist
of the Court of Mantua, so he moves there in the 1460s. Female Voiceover: It's
really important to recognize that what's happening in Mantua is going to be really different than what's happening in Florence. Male Voiceover: Yeah, in
other kinds of cities, Mantua, at this time, is a
court; it's ruled by a marquis, which is a step below a
duke, the Gonzaga family who'd been in control for quite a while are the single dominant
rulers of the city. It's very different from a
situation, as you pointed out, Florence, or Venice, which are republics. So, Mantegna comes and he begins working on this project, which is
called the Camera Picta, or the Camera degli Sposi, which- Female Voiceover: Camera just means Male Voiceover: Room. Male Voiceover: Camera Picta
means the 'painted room'. One thing to point out is
that besides the door frame, and the mantle piece and
some architectural features like these brackets at
the bottom of the vault, everything that we're looking at is paint. Female Voiceover: It's just
amazing to me that it's all paint. Male Voiceover: It's completely frescoed. All of the things that look
like architectural decoration, and ornaments, and moldings,
Female Voiceover: And molding. all of this is fresco. Female Voiceover: He made it look as though the walls are actually open. Male Voiceover: We have the
ceiling that's decorated with these architectural
and sculptural forms, and then it has an
oculus, or this open hole at the center of the ceiling that
we'll take a look at, all painted, and painted very, very naturalisticly and with the careful
attention to perspective, as if you are seeing
3-dimensional objects from below or on the walls and that makes it
illusionistic, as if it's really there. Female Voiceover: And we're,
what, about 40 or 50 years after the death of Masaccio, so it really in that full swing of
the early Renaissance, and humanism, the [unintelligible]
discovery of classical antiquity. Male Voiceover: That's right, and
Mantegna was a big part of that. Speaking of classical antiquity,
and we can start on the ceiling, and what we see is this oculus, and then surrounding it
is this architectural and sculptural ornamentation
that's extremely classisizing in terms of the molding and the details in the ribbons and the garlands, and the putti,
Female Voiceover: And the putti. and what they're holding
are fictive reliefs of the first eight ancient Roman emperors; and so, also [within] the subject matter, the ceiling is extremely classical. What's important to point out is that, we talk a lot about classical
antiquity in the Renaissance, and the revival of antiquity,
but it's important to remember that different types of cities drew from different types
of classical antiquity, and what we're looking at here with these portraits of the emperors, is an imperial classical antiquity, which is entirely appropriate
for a court city like Mantua that's ruled by a marquis or
any other city ruled by a duke. But this kind of imagery would have been completely inappropriate
in a place like Florence. Private citizens in a
republic would not have been allowed to decorate,
Female Voiceover: (laughs) or ruin their house with Roman emperors. Female Voiceover: No, Florence looked back to the period of ancient
Rome when it was a republic. Male Voiceover: So, it's
important to remember that for the people in the Renaissance, they were able to distinguish
between different types of classical antiquity, and pick
what was most relevant to them. Below that, again, we see this open space, and on the walls are frescoes
of the Marquis Ludovico and his everyday life
scenes in what supposedly Mantuan territory scenes
from his activities. Here we see Ludovico meeting
with his son, the cardinal. In the landscape there's some putti that are standing up on top of
the door holding an inscription, and then on this wall we see Ludovico and his wife and his
family and his favorite dog and the court little
person all sitting around while he receives a message
from an adviser on the far left. Then, coming up the stairs on the right are some visitors who
are coming to greet him, and that might be related to
the function of this room, which might have been a kind
of ceremonial greeting space. You see this extremely naturalistic, illusionistic painting that creates the fiction of architectural spaces. Look at how the curtain
seems to be pulled forward and in front of the column,
so sometimes it's really hard to distinguish between
what's real and what's not. Female Voiceover: There's
a lot of fun clearly in playing with those
boundaries and using perspective to fool the eye. Male Voiceover: Right,
because you are looking slightly up at these figures, they're
standing on top of the fireplace, and notice that you
actually do look up at them. You can see slightly up into
the bottom of their tunics, so you don't see the top
surfaces of the stairs or the floor that they're standing on; so, Mantegna's painting it as if you're really seeing them
elevated in that position. This is a part that's
intentionally fun and humorous. This is the oculus, this opening. Oculus means eye in Latin. Female Voiceover: That's
not a real opening. Male Voiceover: Not a real opening; it's just painted from this Di sotto
in su, from below, radical perspective. So, we see everything very foreshortened, the balustade, this railing
that circles the oculus. The putti that are standing here, you seem them very
foreshortened from below. Here's a peacock that we see from below. You see several servants,
including an African one, standing around and they're
looking down and they're laughing. If you look very carefully, you'll notice that one of these women
has her hand on this pole that's supporting this
pot with a plant in it; and the suggestion, I think, is that she's about to pull that pole away and that potted plant is going
to fall right on your head. So, that's the joke; you're
standing there looking up with your mouth hanging open,
and suddenly you realize that there's the joke, the illusion, of these objects that
are going to fall on you. Female Voiceover: In fact,
there are other figures who look like they could drop things on us Male Voiceover: Out of their hands, or- other parts of their body. Male Voiceover: Right,
because look at these putti, not wearing diapers with their
little rear ends sticking out, or the front of them facing us, and so there may be other
things falling on you, too. On the one hand, this room gives us a serious subject matter of the
marquis as a ruler of his domain, with this serious, imperial,
classisizing imagery of the ancient Roman
emperors on the ceiling, but at the same time, in a
kind of marginal location, above your head, what you
might not see right away, there's this puerile,
humorous joking quality that lightens the atmosphere a little bit. (lighthearted music)