In the small room which opens out of the Tribune, on the opposite side
to these three Tuscan rooms, are two perfect little gems of more
northern Italian painting. Mantegna's Madonna of the Quarries (1025),
apart from its nobility of conception and grand austerity of
sentiment, is a positive marvel of minute drawing with the point of
the _pennello_. Every detail in the landscape, with the winding road
up to the city on the hill, the field labourers in the meadow, the
shepherds and travellers, on the left, and the stone-cutterss among
the caverns on the right, preparing stone for the sculptors and
architects of Florence and Rome, is elaborately rendered with
exquisite delicacy and finish. It was painted at Rome in 1488, while
Mantegna was working on his frescoes (now destroyed) for Pope Innocent
VIII. in a chapel of the Vatican. The other is a little Madonna and
Child with two Angels playing musical instruments, by Correggio
(1002), a most exquisite little picture in an almost perfect state of
preservation, formerly ascribed to Titian, but entirely characteristic
of Correggio's earliest period when he was influenced by Mantegna and
the Ferrarese.
Beyond are the Dutch, Flemish, German, and French pictures which do
not come into our present scope--though they include several excellent
works as, notably, a little Madonna by Hans Memlinc and two Apostles
by Albert Dürer. The cabinet of the gems contains some of the
treasures left by the Medicean Grand Dukes, including work by Cellini
and Giovanni da Bologna.
SCUOLA VENETA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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