Entries with Lodovico II tag

Palazzo Te

A twenty-minute achievement from the centre of Mantua, at the end of the long spine of Via Principe Amedeo and Via Acerbi, the Palazzo Te is the later of the city’s two Gonzaga palaces, and equally compelling in its way; and you can take in a few of Mantua’s more minor attractions on the way there. The first thing to look at on the way is Giulio Romano’s Fish Market , to the left off Piazza Martiri Belfiori, a short covered bridge over the river, which is still used as a market building. Following Via Principe Amedeo south, the Casa di Giulio Romano , off to the right at Via Poma 18, overshadowed by the monster-studded Palazzo di Giustizia, was also designed by Romano – like much of his Mantuan work, it was meant to impress the sophisticated, who would have found the licence taken with the Classical rules of structure witty and amusing. A five-minute achievement away on busy Via Giovanni Acerbi, the more austere brick Casa del Mantegna was also designed by the artist, both as a home and private museum, and is now used as a contemporary art-space and conference centre (during exhibitions regular 10am-12.30pm & 3-6pm). Across the road, the church of San Sebastiano (Tues-Sun 10am-12.30pm & 4-6pm; L3000/¬1.55) was the work of Alberti, and is famous as the first Renaissance church to be built on a central Greek cross plan, described as “curiously pagan” by Nicholas Pevsner. Lodovico II’s son was less polite: “I could not understand whether it was meant to turn out as a church, a mosque or a synagogue.” Its days as a consecrated building are over and it now contains commemorative plaques forming a monument to the fallen Mantuan soldiers of World War II.

At the end of Via Giovanni Acerbi, crossways Viale Te, the Palazzo Te (Mon 1-6pm, Tues-Sun 9am-6pm; L12,000/¬6.20) was designed for playboy Federico Gonzaga and his mistress, Isabella Boschetta, by Giulio Romano; it’s the artist/architect’s greatest work and a renowned Renaissance pleasure dome. When the palace was built, Te – or Tejeto, as it used to be known – was an island connected to the mainland by bridge, an saint location for an amorous retreat away from Federico’s wife and the restrictions of life in the Palazzo Ducale. Built around a square courtyard originally occupied by a labyrinth, these days it houses modest but appealing collections of Egyptian artefacts and modern art, although the main reason for visiting is to see Giulio’s amazing decorative scheme.

A tour of the palace is like a voyage around Giulio’s imagination, a sumptuous world where very little is what it seems. In the Camera del Sole e delle Luna , the sun and the moon are represented by a pair of horse-drawn chariots viewed from below, giving a fine array of bottoms on the ceiling; in the Sala dei Cavalli , dedicated to the prime specimens from the Gonzaga stud-farm (which was also on the island), portraits of horses stand before an illusionistic background in which simulated marble, imitation pilasters and mock reliefs surround views of painted landscapes through nonexistent windows. The function of the Sala di Psiche , further on, is undocumented, but the sultry frescoes, and the closeness to Federico’s private quarters, might give a few clues, the ceiling paintings telling the story of Cupid and Psyche with some more dizzying “sotto in su” (from the bottom up) works by Giulio, among others clumsily executed by his pupils. On the walls, too, are spirited pieces, covered with orgiastic wedding-feast scenes, at which drunk and languishing gods in various states of undress are attended by a menagerie of real and mythical beasts. Don’t miss the severely incontinent river-god in the background, included either as a punning reference to Giulio’s second name, Pippi (The Pisser), or as encouragement to Federico who, according to his doctors, suffered from the “obstinate retention of urine”. Other scenes show Mars and Venus having a bath, Olympia about to be raped by a half-serpentine Jupiter and Pasiphae disguising herself as a cow in order to seduce a bull – all watched over by the giant Polyphemus, perched above the fireplace, clutching the pan-pipes with which he sang of his love for Galatea before murdering her lover.

Polyphemus and his fellow giants are revenged in the extraordinary Sala dei Giganti beyond – “the most fantastic and frightening creation of the whole Renaissance”, according to the critic Frederick Hartt – showing the destruction of the giants by the gods. As if at some kind of advanced disaster movie, the destruction appears to be all around: cracking pillars, toppling brickwork, and screaming giants, mangled and crushed by great chunks of architecture, appearing to crash down into the room. Stamp your feet and you’ll discover another parallel to twentieth-century cinema – the sound-effects that Giulio created by making the room into an reflexion chamber.

Category: Mantua / Mantova

Palazzo Ducale

The Palazzo del Capitano and Magna Domus form the core of the Palazzo Ducale , an enormous complex that was once the largest palace in Europe (Tues-Sun 8.45am-7.15pm; June-Sept Sat until 11pm; L12,000/¬6.20). At its height it covered 34,000 square metres, had a population of over a thousand, and when it was sacked by the Habsburgs in 1630 eighty carriages were needed to carry the two thousand works of art contained in its five hundred rooms. Only a proportion of these rooms are open to visitors, and to see them you have to take a guided tour that takes you through to the Sala dei Specchi and then allows you to wander freely through the grounds and the Castello di San Giorgio. The tours are conducted in Italian only and are evenhandedly indiscriminate; save your energy for the rooms that deserve it. At the time of Luigi’s coup of 1328, the Gonzagas were a family of wealthy local peasants, living outside the city on vast estates with an army of retainers. On seizing power Luigi immediately nominated himself Captain of the People – an event pictured in one of the first paintings you’ll see on your tour – and the role quickly became a hereditary one, eventually growing in grandeur to that of marquis. During this time the Gonzagas did their best to make Mantua into a city which was a suitable reflection of their increasing influence, commissioning sought-after Renaissance artists like Mantegna to depict them in their finery. Lodovico II’s grandson, Francesco II, further swelled the Gonzagan coffers by hiring himself out as a mercenary for various other Italian city-states – money his wife, Isabella d’Este, spent amassing a prestigious collection of paintings, sculpture and objets d’art. Under Isabella’s son, Federico II, Gonzaga fortunes reached their height; his marriage to the heiress of the duchy of Monferrato procured a ducal title for the family, while he continued the policy of self-glorification by commissioning an out-of-town villa for himself and his mistress. Federico’s descendants were for the most part less colourful characters, one notable exception being Vincenzo I, whose debauchery and corruption provided the inspiration for Verdi’s licentious duke in Rigoletto . After Vincenzo’s death, the now bankrupt court was forced to sell many of the family treasures to England’s King Charles I (many of the works are still in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum) just three years before it was sacked by the Habsburgs.

The first rooms of the palace are the least impressive. There is a thirteenth-century sculpture of a seated Virgil, a painting from 1494 by Domenico Morone showing the Expulsion of the Bonatosi from the square outside, and, perhaps most interestingly, the fragments of a half-finished fresco by Pisanello, discovered in 1969 behind two layers of plaster and thought to depict either an episode from an Arthurian romance or the (idealized) military exploits of the first marquis, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga. Whatever its subject, it’s a powerful piece of work, charged with energy, in which faces, costumes and landscape are minutely observed.

Further on, through the Sala dello Zodiaco, whose late sixteenth-century ceiling is spangled with stars and constellations, is the Salone dei Fiume (“Room of the Rivers”), in which Baroque trompe l’oeil goes over the top to create a mock garden complete with painted creepers and two ghastly fountains surrounded by stalactites and stalagmites. The Sala dei Specchi (“Hall of the Mirrors”) has a notice outside signed by Monteverdi, who worked as court musician to Vincenzo I and gave frequent concerts of new works – notably the world’s first modern opera, L’Orfeo , written in 1607. Vincenzo also employed Rubens, whose Adoration of the Magi in the Salone degli Arcieri , next door, shows the Gonzaga family of 1604, including Vincenzo with his handlebar moustache. The picture was originally part of a triptych, but Emperor troops carried off two-thirds of it after briefly occupying the town in 1797 and chopped the remaining third into saleable chunks of portraiture. Although most have been traced, and some returned to the palazzo, there are still a few gaps. Around the room is a curious frieze of horses, glimpsed behind curtains.

The Castello di San Giorgio contains the palace’s principal treasure, however: Mantegna’s frescoes of the Gonzaga family – among the painter’s most famous works, splendidly restored in the so-called Camera degli Sposi and depicting the Marquis Lodovico and his wife Barbara with their family. They’re naturalistic pieces of work, giving a vivid impression of real people, of the relationships between them and of the tensions surrounding something that is happening, or about to happen. In the main one Lodovico discusses a letter with a courtier while his wife looks on; their youngest daughter leans on her mother’s lap, about to bite into an apple, while an older son and daughter (possibly Barbarina) look towards the door, where an ambassador from another court is being welcomed – lending some credence to the theory that negotiations are about to take place for Barbarina’s marriage. The other fresco, The Meeting , takes place out of doors against a landscape of weird rock formations and an imaginary city with the Gonzagan arms above the gate. Divided into three sections by imitation pilasters, it shows Gonzagan retainers with dogs and a horse in attending on Lodovico, who is welcoming his son Francesco back from Rome, where he had just become the first Gonzaga to be prefabricated a cardinal. In the background are the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and the King of Denmark – a selection which apparently annoyed the Duke of Milan, who was incensed that the “two most wretched men in the world” had been included while he had been omitted. Lodovico’s excuse was that he would have included the duke had he not objected so strongly to Mantegna’s uncompromising portrait style. If you have time before the guide sweeps you out, have a look at the ceiling, another nice piece of trompe l’oeil, in which two women, peering down from a balustrade, have balanced a tub of plants on a pole and appear to be on the verge of letting it tumble into the room – an illusionism that was to be crucial in the development of the Gonzaga’s next resident artist of any note, Giulio Romano, whose Palazzo Te should not be missed.

Finally, the private apartments of Isabella d’Este , on the ground floor, are sometimes on view. Though they once housed works by Michelangelo, Mantegna and Perugino, only the unmoveable decorations remain – inlaid cupboards and intricately carved ceilings and doors. A ruthless employer, Isabella would threaten her artists and craftsmen with the dungeon if she thought they were working too slowly, and had no compunction about bullying Mantegna on his death-bed to give her a piece of sculpture she particularly coveted. She was more deferential to Leonardo da Vinci, however, who did two drawings of her but ignored her suggestion that one be converted into a portrait of Christ. Isabella also collected dwarfs, whose job it was to cheer her up while her husband was away fighting. For centuries it was assumed that the suite of miniature rooms beyond Isabella’s apartments was built for the dwarfs; in fact it’s a scaled-down version of the St John Lateran basilica in Rome, built for Vincenzo.

Category: Mantua / Mantova

About Mantua

Aldous Huxley called it the most romantic city in the world; and with an Arabian nights skyline rising above its three encircling lakes, MANTUA ( MANTOVA ) is undeniably evocative. It was the scene of Verdi’s Rigoletto , and its history is one of equally operatic plots, most of them perpetuated by the Gonzagas, one of Renaissance Italy’s richest and most powerful families, who ruled the town for three centuries. Its centre of interlinking cobbled squares retains its medieval aspect, and there are two splendid palaces: the Palazzo Ducale , containing Mantegna’s stunning fresco of the Gonzaga family and court, and Palazzo Te , whose frescoes by the flashy Mannerist Giulio Romano have entertained and outraged generations of visitors with their combination of steamy erotica and illusionistic fantasy.But hazy sunsets reflected in tranquil lakes, and the town’s melodramatic history, are only half the story. Outside the few traffic-free streets of the historic centre the roads are lined with grimy Fascist-era buildings and crowded with cars, while the outskirts have been desecrated by chemical, plastics and paper works that are reputedly responsible for lining the bed of the largest lake, Superiore, with mercury. Nevertheless, the core of the city is still appealing, especially on Thursdays when Piazza Mantegna, Piazza dell’Erbe and the streets around are filled with a large market.

The state of these same streets aroused the ire of a visiting pope in 1459, who complained that Mantua was muddy, marshy, riddled with fever and intensely hot. His host, Lodovico II Gonzaga, was spurred into action: he could do little about the heat (Mantua can still be unbearably hot and mosquito-ridden in summer) but he did give the city an elaborate facelift, ranging from paving the squares and repainting the shops, to engaging Mantegna as court artist and calling in the prestigious architectural theorist Alberti to design the monumental church of Sant’Andrea – one of the most influential buildings of the primeval Renaissance. Lodovico’s successors continued the tradition of artistic patronage, and although most of the thousands of works of art once owned by the Gonzagas are now scattered around Europe, the town still has plenty of relics from the era

The City

The centre of Mantua is prefabricated up of four interlinking squares, the first of which, Piazza Mantegna , is a small, wedge-shaped open space at the end of the arcaded shopping thoroughfare of Corso Umberto . It’s dominated by the deception of Alberti’s church of Sant’Andrea , an unfinished basilica that says a lot about the ego of Lodovico II Gonzaga, who commissioned it. He felt that the existing medieval church was neither impressive enough to represent the splendour of his state nor large enough to hold the droves of people who flocked to Sant’Andrea every Ascension Day to see the holy relic of Christ’s blood which had been found on the site. The relic is still there, and after years of dispute about its authenticity (it was supposed to have been brought to Mantua by the soldier who pierced Christ’s side), Pope Pius II settled the matter in the fifteenth century by declaring it had miraculously cured him of gout.Work started on the church in 1472, with the court architect, Luca Fancelli, somewhat resentfully overseeing Alberti’s plans. There was a bitchy rivalry between the two, and when, on one of his many visits, Alberti fell and hurt a testicle, Fancelli gleefully told him that “God lets men punish themselves in the place where they sin”. Inside, the church is roofed with one immense barrel vault, echoing the triumphal arch of the facade, which gives it a rather cool and calculated feel. The octagonal balustrade at the crossing stands above the crypt where the holy relic is kept in two vases, copies of originals designed by Cellini and stolen by the Austrians in 1846; to see them, ask the sacristan. The painter Mantegna is buried in the first chapel on the left, his tomb topped with a bust of the artist that’s said to be a self-portrait; the wall-paintings in the chapel were designed by the artist and executed by students, one of whom was Correggio.

Opposite Sant’Andrea, sunk below the present level of the adjoining Piazza dell’Erbe , is Mantua’s oldest church, the eleventh-century Rotonda (daily 10am-noon & 2.30-4.30pm), which narrowly escaped destruction under Lodovico’s city-improvement plans, only to be partially demolished in the sixteenth century and used as a courtyard by the surrounding houses. Rebuilt at the beginning of this century and beautifully restored in the last few years, it still contains traces of twelfth- and thirteenth-century frescoes. Piazza dell’Erbe itself is one of the town’s most characterful squares, with a small regular market and cafés and restaurants sheltering in the arcades below the thirteenth-century Palazzo della Ragione , whose impressive wooden-vaulted main hall is viewable during occasional temporary exhibitions. At the north end of the square, a passage leads under the red-brick Broletto , or medieval town hall, into the smaller Piazza Broletto , where you can view two reminders of how “criminals” were treated under the Gonzagas. The bridge to the right has metal rings embedded in its vault, to which victims were chained by the wrists, before being hauled up by a pulley and suspended in mid-air; while on your far left – actually on the corner of Piazza Sordello – the tall medieval Torre della Gabbia has a cage attached in which prisoners were displayed. The Broletto itself is more generous to deserving Mantuans, and is dedicated to the city’s two most famous sons: Virgil, a statue of whom overlooks the square, and Tazio Nuvolari, Italy’s most celebrated racing driver, whose career is mapped in a small museum (April-Oct Tues, Wed & Fri-Sun 10am-1pm & 3.30-6.30pm; rest of year by appointment tel 0376.325.691; L5000/¬2.58).

If you have the time, it’s well worth making a short diversion off Via Broletto up Via Accademia to the eighteenth-century Teatro Scientifico or Bibiena (daily 9.30am-12.30pm & 3-6pm; L4000/¬2.07), designed by Antonio Bibiena, whose brother designed the Bayreuth Opera House. This is a much smaller theatre, at once intimate and splendid, its curving walls lined with boxes calculated to make their inhabitants more conspicuous than the performers. A thirteen-year-old Mozart gave the inaugural concert here: his impression is unrecorded, but his father was fulsome in his praise for the building, writing that he had never in his life seen anything more beautiful. Concerts are still given – details from the theatre or tourist office.

Beyond Piazza Broletto, Piazza Sordello is a large, sombre square, headed by the Baroque deception of the Duomo and flanked by grim crenellated palaces built by the Gonzagas’ predecessors, the Bonalcosi. The duomo conceals a rich interior, designed by Giulio Romano after the church had been gutted by fire. As for the palaces, the two on the left are now owned by the successors of Baldassare Castiglione, a relative of the Gonzagas, who prefabricated himself unpopular at the Mantuan court by setting his seminal handbook of Renaissance behaviour, The Book of the Courtier , in the rival court of Urbino. Opposite, the Palazzo del Capitano and Magna Domus were taken by Luigi Gonzaga when he seized Mantua from the Bonalcosi in 1328, the beginning of three hundred years of Gonzaga rule.

Category: Mantua / Mantova