Tuns is an excellent book; the one small fault is
that there are not references to the plates in the text. It contains a short but full study of Mantegna as a painter, as a man, and of his work, followed by a full catalogue of his paintings and by a survey of engravings that are probably to be attributed to him. There are 152 plates of his more important paintings, and an appendix of twenty-two plates with several figures On each illustrating a very varied selection of comparative material. The catalogue will be invaluable to students, while the Introduction cannot fail to appeal to .a wider body Of readers. The colour plates add that touch of life which is essential when one is dealing with works of art. The colours would appear to be accurate; some of them are certainly outstandingly beautiful, notably the frontispiece, which reproduces a detail from the frescoes of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua, and that facing page 8, which is ot a detail of the panel of the Death of the Virgin at Madrid.
It is tragic how seriously nearly all Man- tegna's greatest works have suffered; the frescoes of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua were already suffering from damp in the 16th century, and efforts at restoration have done more harm than good. The important series of paintings at Hampton Court are wrecks. The whole of the Eremetani chapel at Padua was blown up during the war, and only a few fragments of Mantcgna's frescoes survive. What does survive, however, serves to show his greatness. He was an innovator in com- position, an experimenter with regard to per- spective. and, like so many of the greatest men, often did things which were strikingly in advance of his age, even to paintiri2. decorations which are virtually baroque their interest in illusionism or even in pure trompe-rmil. His contribution to painting is so important, so delightful, that any volume which illustrated it would be welcome. Mr. l'ietze-Conrat's book does not disappoint in this respect, and he brings out a few especially interesting points which one would have been happy to see treated more fully, notably the presence of Flemish elements in Mantegna's earlier work, or the essentially Paduan character of the Eremetani frescoes. What was it that gave to each city in Italy so individual a character? It is one of the things that can he seeni or sensed, but no one has succeeded in describing these subtle differences in words.
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