MANTEGNA's CAMERA DEGLI SPOSI: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ROOM IN THE WORLD I: LOCATION AND OVERVIEW

MANTEGNA'S CAMERA DEGLI SPOSI 
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ROOM IN THE WORLD
  I: THE LOCATION AND OVERVIEW

Before leaving Mantegna and Bellini, we must survey Mantegna's frescoed room in the Ducal Palace in Mantua which he worked on from 1465-74 for the Gonzaga family.  Called "the most beautiful room in the world" by a Milanese
ambassador in 1475, it might still merit that epithet. (Alison Cole, Virtue and Magnificence, Abrams, 1995, p. 52.)


 
Because of the complexity of this work, we have devoted three blogs to it, this first one to set the room in its location and discuss it as a whole.
Mantua is built on a tributary of the Po River called the Mincio, and the ducal palace grew out of a fortress right on the Mincio called the Castello di San Giorgio.

In this plan the Castello is on the far left in orange, and the Camera degli Sposi is indicated in the corner north tower of the Castello in the right of the photo.
 Here the room is marked out in yellow.

From the exterior, the room can be found on what we call the second floor of the Castle, what is called in Italian the piano nobile, the noble floor, high above the moat and river waters so the courtiers who lived in those apartments could be safe from attack and floods.

The room had a real fireplace on the north wall and windows on the north and east walls.


 

As can be seen in this Italian plan division, the south and east walls were essentially blank, painted as if leather wall covering with some decoration but no figures. A bed was set in that corner.  The North and West Walls, as well as the ceiling, were the playground of the artist and he used the openings, such as the fireplace, to his advantage in composing the frescoes for these walls. 

The courtiers and the ducal family are displayed on the north wall above the fireplace and Mantegna sets the stage with the fireplace as the resting place of the fictive Persian carpet seen on the left and the stairs seen leading down to the right. (Scroll right for complete view.) Carpet and stairs are the platforms on which the Gonzaga family and their courtiers stand and sit. Mantegna's painted gold curtains are drawn back to reveal the scene.

On the West wall he blasts open the wall space to reveal a distant landscape with sky and clouds, and he paints lifesize figures of the Gonzaga family standing within that landscape. The effect of the pictorial fiction on both of these walls is to perforate the wall space and to ask the viewer to compare real architecture with painted, real people with painted, real landscape with painted. Notice the painted curtains drawn back in each of these three wall separations.

And, as if these walls were not enough of an exposition of his skill at foreshortening and infinite space, he turns the ceiling into the oculus of a fictive Pantheon by presenting a hole open to the sky, with courtiers and servants peering down at us as if from the top of a well.

 

Surrounding the oculus he paints fictive bas-relief medallions of eight Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar through Otho:

 








 Here the examples are Claudius and Tiberius





The effect of the combined oculus with bas-reliefs and fictive vaulting that joins
with real architecture on the sides of the room is to create a canopy over the
viewer as well as the Gonzagas, so that every viewer who enters the room shares the same space inside a condottiere tent with the condottiere and his family. Mantegna wanted to set up a military tent with leather sides and an open hole
at the top, much like this one in Toledo Museum of the Army that survived from
Emperor Charles V in the 16th century:
 

 

We are included in the tent with the courtiers of the family, with their animals
and birds:
 

 We are there when the condottiere receives a message from his "camerlengo,"
 

which they discuss while the family looks on. Ludovico, the Duke, is seated with

red hat, and his private secretary is to his left leaning in. More about the message in another blog.

We are also there when the Duke takes his horse and dogs slightly outside the

tent to meet his son, Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga. The cloth sides of the tent are drawn back (hence the fictive curtains) so that the spectator is allowed views through three of the tent's openings on the left wall. Mantegna understood his client. He created for him a pavillion open to the landscape which he would feel comfortable in because it was a military tent inside his own home. The Duke, who was a condottiere, mercenary soldier, is armed with two swords while standing in the left wall painting,

He is not wearing armor but one sword hangs on his belt while his left hand

holds the hilt of the other sword. What he is defending here, as a descendant of Roman emperors alluded to on the ceiling, is his family, his children and grandchildren. La famiglia e tutta, and he is the emperor of his own world, the world of Mantova.

To make sure the viewer understands the capability of the artist to create his own world in just paint, Mantegna projects into his painted landscape on the West wall furthest left panel a rock formation that is the very essence of his idea of what painting is.

Through the painted arch opening formed by a fictive rock bridge, the artist places a Roman pine in the distance and a hill-top town beyond that. For Mantegna, painting is about opening vistas to other worlds for the viewer. To remind us of the creativity required for such tricks of the eye, he paints a finished tower fortress much like the one in which he is painting (play within a play) on the top of the rock cliff on the far left,

then he inserts a folded back curtain to the side of that fortress that casts a shadow with its own fold. To compare with the finished product, he paints below on another jutting rock, a similar tower under construction with scaffolding on its exterior within a white-wall fort.

He "builds" these edifices just as he "builds" the fictive environment into which he sets the ducal family. He is the creator of scene, of architecture, of hole in the rock, of clouds. Like a novelist, he makes a world unto its own that is entirely his. His deified sense of his own creative productions makes the viewer mesmerized, captivated with the space cut through the rock, the space cut through the wall, the space with buildings invented out of nothing from the imagination of the artist.

From the moment the viewer enters through this door on the south wall,

the world of illusion takes over and we are the captors of the painter's invenzione, sometimes even his victims (see the entry on the ceiling.) At every turn the artist is playing with the spectator and his/her acceptance of his illusion. The first thing that comes into view on the left wall, even before the rock hole, is the Duke's horse held by two grooms in the far left panel. The horse's eye looks out at the viewer and follows the viewer no matter where the viewer moves in the
room.
 

The force of the illusion that the horse is a being making contact with the viewer stays with the visitor through the whole experience of the room.

Known in oral history as the Room of the Newlyweds, Camera degli Sposi, it was referred to in the written documents of the fifteenth century as the CAMERA PICTA, the PAINTED ROOM. It was the Duke Ludovico Gonzaga's bedroom and also the reception room for visiting dignitaries, so the frescoes were designed to impress. And what a force the room projects! The full intention of it is hard to convey in two dimensions, but Mantegna meant it to be his masterpiece and it is. Mantegna includes in these paintings the interests for which he became famous:
1) opening out of the wall - perspective and landscape on two walls and ceiling
2) classical history roundels in ceiling  - 1st eight Roman Emperors with their Latin names placed in roundels that seem to be stucco; he is competing with sculptors and showing his knowledge of Ancient Rome
3) realistic portraits of the ducal family; these showed Mantegna's ability to render lifelike figures; as a reception room, the visitor/viewer would be able to compare the real Ludovico with his painted image as he sat beneath it.
4) foreshortening - putti in the oculus
5) trompe l'oeil (literally from the French - "fooling of the eye") - the ceiling oculus and the stairs next to the fireplace, the landscape scene beyond the figures, the curtains that open out to the courtiers
6) sotto in su view - the artist takes the viewer into account on every surface painted, but especially in the ceiling where he is showing us people leaning over a parapet from "below looking up" (the viewer's point of view)
7) Mantegna's exposition of life as playfulness and serious menace with the dignified family set in between those forces.


Every art historian of Italian art must make a trip to see this room for its 'trompe-l'oeil' and for the skill of the painter's play with space. While painted first, the oculus is what viewers take in and savor last, a pictorial trick that cannot be
forgotten.

For a further explanation and closer look at all three painted surfaces, see next three blogs.