Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the Camera degli Sposi. Around a great trompe l’oeil oculus, apparently open to the sky, assorted gawpers and cherubs lean nosily over the parapet: ‘What’s going on down there, then?’ Only the Duke and Duchess of Gonzaga entertaining their friends from Ferrara. A terracotta pot is half off the edge, supported only by a thin rod. One nudge from a misbehaving putto and — whoops! — just missed the Duchess. Some of the putti stick their heads through the trellis. Another stands on a ledge, flashing us his bare, plump, crinkly bottom, brilliantly foreshortened by Mantegna.
Giovanni Bellini’s figures tend not to show us their bums. His pale Madonnas and sleeping Christ Childs possess a quiet decorum and holy composure that Mantegna, for all his tricks of perspective, never mastered. Compare, for instance, the angels that appear to Christ in the two versions of the ‘Agony in the Garden’, which have hung in the National Gallery for well over a century and which are the jumping-off point for the gallery’s stellar autumn exhibition Mantegna and Bellini.
In Mantegna’s ‘Agony’ (c.1455–6), the angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, zoom towards Christ on a cloud like a hoverboard. One angel has his foot tangled in a wisp of cumulus; another curls his soles over the cloud’s edge, in danger of tumbling over on to the Mount of Olives. Together the five angels make a gang of Bash Street Kids. Bellini’s angel (c.1458–60) is a solitary figure, fragile and transparent as Murano glass, a reminder that Christ shoulders the sins of mankind and suffers his crucifixion alone.
Compare, too, the swaddled infants in Mantegna and Bellini’s treatments of Christ’s Presentation at the Temple, c.1454
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