L’IMPRONTA DI ANDREA MANTEGNA
A rediscovered painting from the Museo Correr’s collections

From 18 December 2024
Venice, Museo Correr, Picture Gallery

Restoration supported by Fondazione G.E. Ghirardi Onlus

The small panel painting of The Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist and Six Female Saints was part of the fabulous collection left to the city by Teodoro Correr in 1830, the original core of today’s Musei Civici.

It was kept in storage at the Museo Correr in precarious conditions that restricted its visibility and display until the museum’s curator perceived the signs of some outstanding pictorial and compositional qualities in small areas less damaged by repainting and deterioration. This led to closer study, which included sophisticated diagnostic investigation techniques followed by restoration, generously supported by Fondazione G.E. Ghirardi Onlus.

photo Matteo de Fina

The fact that immediately emerged, truly exceptional and very intriguing, is that the work, of highly refined execution (its fine chiaroscuro has pure gold highlights, as in the most exquisite miniatures), clearly reveals the stylistic imprint of one of the greatest Italian painters of the Renaissance: Andrea Mantegna.

Above all, the same singular, wholly “female” sacred scene is almost identical to that of a painting now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (USA), painted in the closing years of the 15th century, attributed to the great painter and formerly in the Gonzagas’ famous Mantuan collections.

The Venetian conservators have already advanced interesting conjectures on the basis of X-ray studies. The outline of the drawing detected beneath the pigment coincides with that in the Boston painting, especially at some very precise points. Hence both paintings seem to have been made from the same perforated cartoon with the salient points of the drawing transferred to the two panels by pouncing.

This suggests that they were created in the same workshop within a short interval of time, if not at the same time. The artist appears to have created two almost identical paintings, with some slight but significant variations in detail and colour.

Another essential fact that emerged from analysis and restoration – heightening the mystery and fascination of the rediscovered painting – is that it is an unfinished work. After a very careful creative process, certainly lengthy and painstaking, for an unknown reason the painter ceased work on it when just one step away from completion.

But the mysteries and questions do not end here. Who was the man or, more likely, the woman (perhaps an illustrious lady of the Gonzaga family) who commissioned the painting? Why would he or she have required two identical paintings and for which recipients? And again: what journey did the now rediscovered painting make in reaching Venice? What hands did it pass through before reaching the insatiable collector Teodoro Correr in the late 18th or early 19th centuries?

The work, excellently recovered by restoration, will be on view at Museo Correr in Venice, after being exhibited for the first time at Villa Contarini – Fondazione G. E. Ghirardi in Piazzola sul Brenta (Mantegna’s birthplace).

The work will be on view from 18 December 2024, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.