While the COVID pandemic keeps research travel on hold, the scholarly art historical itinerary presented in the series “Il mito e la storia” leads us through traditions surrounding Mantegna from Northern Italy to an unexpected location of a hill town in Basilicata. Montepeloso, renamed Irsina in 1895, keeps a donation including the marble statue of Saint Euphemia with her lion on a rotating movable platform attributed to Mantegna.
Stylistic attribution was supported by a Latin source rediscovered in the Vatican archives three decades ago, the 1592 “Vita divae Euphemiae Virginis et Martiris” by the archdeacon of Montepeloso Pasquale Verrone. It records a certain Roberto De Mabilia who had been responsible in 1454 for the sending of the statue from the Veneto to Basilicata. The same year saw also the arrival of a Madonna and Child, a Donatellian Crucifix, a Veronese red marble baptismal font, a column, and a reliquary with relics of the martyr's arm. The life-size statue shows the saint with one hand in the lion's jaws in remembrance of her martyrdom suffered in 304 CE. Euphemia was thrown to wild beasts after her refusal of a pagan sacrifice; the pose of the gingerly lion resonates with Mantegna's painted Euphemia in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.
Roberto de Mabilia had moved from Montepeloso to Padua, where the prelate became a wealthy notary and rector of San Daniele. For the enduring commemoration of his own role in the appointment of Montepeloso as a bishopric by a papal bull of 1452, Mabilia commissioned the sculptural program in the North. This is where the issue of Mantegna as designer and/or maker of the sculptures comes in. Disentangling the historical, art historical, technical, and connoisseurial questions around Mabilia's donation, the collection of articles sails under the flag of the Centro Studi Robertus de Apulia di Irsina and the Università di Padova's eminent Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell'Antichità. The broad spectrum of analytical approaches are the result of a collaboration between the editors and, following the studies of Paolo Sambin and Francesco Liguori, art historians Vittoria Camelliti and Manlio Leo Mezzacasa, as well as dottorandi Elena Cera (Università di Padova) and Marco Scansani (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa).
The book opens with the donation's discovery and its consequences (Benucci), followed by research on the three sculptural works (Camelliti), chronologies (Cera/Scansani), the baptismal font (Calzone) and its former version in the Romanesque cathedral (Calzone/Benucci), the reliquary (Mezzacasa), the column between Padua and Montepeloso (Franco Benucci), the technical analysis (Trabace) including non-invasive diagnostics such as UV fluorescent and microphotographic imagery and multispectral analysis of the crucifix (Laquale/Kala) and of the statues of Saint Euphemia (Improta/Avogadro), investigating the restoration process as a cognitive instrument.
The attribution to Mantegna submitted by Clara Gelao (director of the Provincial Pinacoteca of Bari) was supported by art critics such as Vittorio Sgarbi, but contested by others who rather suggest Pietro Lombardo (on attribution, see in particular 49 and 66). One reason for this hesitation is the uncertainty inherent in the lack of comparanda. Another deeper reason might be the dilemma of moving from heated, seemingly irreconcilable debates around “Mantegna incisore” to the possibility that the truth is in a third position with Mantegna planning, designing, but also outsourcing parts of his commissions on the plates. (See Suzanne Boorsch, “Mantegna and Engraving: What We Know, What We Don't Know, and a Few Hypotheses,” in Rodolfo Signorini, Viviana Rebonato, and Sara Tammaccaro, eds., Andrea Mantegna: Impronta del genio, [2010], 415–38.)
Mantegna's important links to sculpture are documented in his earliest education in Squarcione's workshop, often credited for his own stone-like, sculptural, and monumental registers of style in painting. A drawing such as Mantegna's “Project for a Monument to Virgil” from around 1500 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) demonstrates that he was planning and thinking sculpturally. Yet “Mantegna scultore” might also be too vague for a similarly multifaceted production process that is unknown in its details and the number and identities of hands. Regardless of where the full or partial attribution to Mantegna falls for the reader, the book makes a convincing case for the entire donazione de Mabilia to be worthy of this extensive, and further, study.
