When Giottesque culture arrived in Mantua. The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine

It is difficult, with the Renaissance splendors that invade the collective imagination whenever one thinks of the arts in Mantua, to imagine that the city had a fruitful artistic life even before the arrival of the various Mantegna, Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Fancelli and so on enumerated. Not to mention, then, the figurative culture that the city knew before 1328, the year in which Luigi I Gonzaga won the war, worth the final control of the city, fought against Rinaldo Bonacolsi. It is curious, when one considers that the axis on which the bulk of tourists’ strolling and even part of the inhabitants’ struscio is concentrated, namely Piazza Sordello-Broletto-Rotonda di San Lorenzo, corresponds to the main nucleus of 14th-century Mantua, and even today the 14th century marks with indelible traces the connotations of the city, its palaces, and the Ducal Palace itself.

“The charm of Mantua is in the total oblivion of time that it communicates, absorbed, under the heavy, plain sky, in the memories of a past whose dead beauty can be breathed in the silent streets, in the sunny squares.” Fernanda Wittgens wrote this in 1937, reviewing in Emporium the exhibition of Gonzaga iconography that was held that year in the city, and without hesitating to look for the physiognomy of fourteenth-century Mantua in the Palazzo del Capitano and the Magna Domus, noting “how much of the ancient character still remained to the magnificent square, to its palaces.” It is no easy feat to reconstruct the fate of the fourteenth-century arts in Mantua: not much remained before the middle of the century, and very little before 1328, while the situation is better from the fourth decade onward. Nor has there ever been a systematic study of the arts in 14th-century Mantua as a whole, and what there is, is all very dated. The fine, comprehensive and much-needed exhibition Dante and the Culture of the Fourteenth Century in Mantua, which opened on October 15 for 2021 at the Ducal Palace to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of the Supreme Poet’s passing and is curated by Stefano L’Occaso, has therefore intervened to make up for an absence, although there has been no lack of research, even recent research, on single episodes or otherwise cut vertically. Ample the material that the exhibition has gathered, many new and unpublished proposals, and it will be worthwhile to dwell on a single piece, partly because of its charm and partly because of the new ones concerning it, namely the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, a torn fresco, a fragment of the decoration of the Bonacolsi chapel, now owned of the Fondazione Romana e Raimonda Freddi di San Silvestro di Curtatone, but granted since 2015 on loan to the Ducal Palace Museum.

One might be tempted to believe that the Bonacolsi Chapel, where this fragment stood until 1870, the year in which the Pisan restorer Guglielmo Botti tore it out along with other frescoes that were in good condition, is a kind of remnant of 14th-century Mantua, one of the few pieces surviving from a book that has lost most of its pages. Instead, she herself is an open book on the events, historical and artistic, that affected the city in the troubled turn of years that followed the fall of the Bonacolsi. Today disfigured and accessible with supreme difficulty, despite being located in Palazzo Acerbi Cadenazzi, on the side of Piazza Sordello overlooking the cathedral, above the ice cream parlors and souvenir stores (the site is privately owned), the chapel was theprivate oratory of the Bonacolsi family, who ordered its decoration around 1310 (perhaps the patron was the very Rinaldo who was defeated and killed in battle on August 16, 1328), and it is the oldest private worship space in Mantua. When Luigi Gonzaga took possession of the city and settled in his rival’s residence (at least from the beginning of 1329: the discovery of the date is by L’Occaso) he had the whole room repainted: the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine dates from this second phase. Or rather: third phase, if we take into account the reading proposed in the 1990s by Ugo Bazzotti, who identified on the walls of the chapel an initial drafting of Christ among the Doctors, that is, the fresco decorating the back wall, a second Bonacolsian phase with the repainting of the same scene and the execution of the Stories of Christ and the Saints on the other walls, and finally the Gonzaga phase. The artist of the second phase was an already Giottesque painter, and the intentions were ambitious: “to this master,” Andrea De Marchi wrote in 2000, “we undoubtedly owe the decorative framework of the entire room, articulated by three vertical bands with cosmatesque ornaments and mixtilinear compasses, which continued on the barrel vault, according to an incredible desire to remake the Scrovegni Chapel in tiny size.”

The Mystic Marriage, it has been said, belongs to the next phase. In what is left of the scene, a tribute of Luigi Gonzaga’s wife Caterina Malatesta to her patron saint, we see a Gothic half-throne, foreshortened in an empirical and intuitive perspective, on which the Virgin is seated, holding the Child with one hand, looking away from the scene. The infant holds his position with improbable balance: he is standing on his mother’s knee and leaning forward with his right arm to slip the ring on the finger of St. Catherine, turned three-quarter turn and with his eyes fixed on those of Jesus. We see the half-figure figures, but they were originally painted in full: we note this well in the copies of the frescoes made by Giuseppe Razzetti in 1858, when the paintings had just been discovered by Count Carlo d’Arco. However, the frescoes were dismembered and put on the market by the then owner of the building: the best-preserved ones were bought by Venetian photographer Carlo Naya, then inherited by sculptor Antonio Dal Zotto, and then passed to his nephew Ferruccio Battaglio. The Mystic Marriage remained in Venice for a long time, only to be purchased in 1991 by entrepreneur Romano Freddi: since then the history of the fresco has remained linked to him and his foundation.

The exceptional nature of this painting is such that Berenson even went so far as to attribute it to Giotto. Years later, Federico Zeri, who discussed the Mystic Marriage in the catalog of Italian paintings at the Metropolitan in New York, where a fragment of the decoration of the Bonacolsi chapel is found, established that the author of this scene must nevertheless have looked to Giotto degli Scrovegni, or more generally to Paduan painting after Giotto, and of the same opinion would later be Andrea De Marchi: that the artist was familiar with the Arena paintings is shown, L’Occaso explains, by the foreshortened rendering of the haloes that follow the depth of space suggested by the throne in perspective, the setting of the figures and the complexion that “is fused, as in the Paduan frescoes.” “a rather stringent comparison,” the scholar writes, "can be suggested with the monochrome Iusticia in the wainscoting“ of the Scrovegni Chapel, while ”the angels materializing from the clouds also have a precedent, for example in theAdoration of the Shepherds and theAnnouncement to Joachim of the Arena. "

However, we do not know to whom this beautiful painting with figures silhouetted against a blue sky is due, nor is there unanimous agreement on its area of origin. Padovano, it has been said, according to Zeri and De Marchi, but also according to Bazzotti, while it would be Veronese according to Chiara Spanio and Stefano L’Occaso, who calls into question the links between the Gonzaga and the Scaligeri, as well as the kinship between Luigi Gonzaga and Guglielmo da Castelbarco, a Veronese condottiere known for having promoted the construction of the church of San Fermo in Verona and having been the commissioner of the paintings with which it is adorned. Giottesque paintings, sanctioning the arrival of the language of the Florentine master in Verona before 1320. The Mystic Marriage could be by the same hand as the artist who painted the San Fermo frescoes: different formal characters (way of treating the drapery and morphology of the characters) prompted L’Occaso, on the occasion of the exhibition on Dante and Mantua, to propose “with growing conviction the name of the Master of the Redeemer, author of the frescoes of the choir of the Franciscan church of San Fermo in Verona.” Dividing him from the latter is “a softness of complexion and a roundness of superior drapery.” Painting for a private client in a limited setting, however, was quite different from executing a demanding fresco cycle in a large church. In any case, whoever the author, we can say with a good margin of safety that, by the date of 1330, Giottesque culture had already arrived in Mantua.

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