While generally addressed in terms of its typicality -as group portraiture, princely propaganda, courtly wall decoration, a demonstration of perspectival illusion- Mantegna's 'painted chamber' in the Gonzaga palace is considered here as a visual discourse on the pictorial technologies of portraiture and of perspective. The painting embeds princely portraiture in a poetical dialectic, confronting it with remarkable figurations of the "pathos" such portraiture had normally excluded, and supplements perspectival virtuosity with embodied personifications of "spiriti visivi" in the form of winged erotes. Mantegna is thus shown to have resisted a particular Albertian dispensation of "pictura" defined entierly by the geometric character of vision.
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