DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62360#0023
CHAPTER I
LIFE IN PADUA
ANDREA MANTEGNA was born in 1431, not,
as was formerly supposed, in Padua, but in the
neighbouring town of Vicenza.1 He, however, signs
himself “Patavinus” up to his latest years, and a
Paduan we also feel him essentially to be, indebted
to the scholarly atmosphere of that city for the
development of those qualities of severity and
restraint, that classic purity and distinction, by which
his work from beginning to end is characterised.
Of his parentage we know nothing but that his father’s
name was Biagio—“the honoured Ser Biagio,” he is
called in a Mantuan document, although Vasari declares
him to have been of the humblest extraction, telling us
also that Andrea himself spent his childhood, Giotto-
like, tending sheep. If that be the case, he could not
have been a very efficient guardian, since at the age of
ten he was already so far advanced in the art of paint-
ing as to be received into the Fraglia dei Pittori e
Coffanari—the fraternity or guild of Paduan artists.
Into this guild he was received, for some un-
known reason, as the son of Francesco Squarcione, an
1 Proved by a document preserved in the Venice archives, to which
we refer again on page 17.
LIFE IN PADUA
ANDREA MANTEGNA was born in 1431, not,
as was formerly supposed, in Padua, but in the
neighbouring town of Vicenza.1 He, however, signs
himself “Patavinus” up to his latest years, and a
Paduan we also feel him essentially to be, indebted
to the scholarly atmosphere of that city for the
development of those qualities of severity and
restraint, that classic purity and distinction, by which
his work from beginning to end is characterised.
Of his parentage we know nothing but that his father’s
name was Biagio—“the honoured Ser Biagio,” he is
called in a Mantuan document, although Vasari declares
him to have been of the humblest extraction, telling us
also that Andrea himself spent his childhood, Giotto-
like, tending sheep. If that be the case, he could not
have been a very efficient guardian, since at the age of
ten he was already so far advanced in the art of paint-
ing as to be received into the Fraglia dei Pittori e
Coffanari—the fraternity or guild of Paduan artists.
Into this guild he was received, for some un-
known reason, as the son of Francesco Squarcione, an
1 Proved by a document preserved in the Venice archives, to which
we refer again on page 17.