Ancient and Mediaeval Elements in Mantegna's Trial of St. James

* I take pleasure in this opportunity to thank Mr. Ernest Nash, of Fototeca di Architettura e Topografia dell'Italia Antica, Rome, for his great help to me in procuring most of the photographs used to illustrate this paper.

Abstract

MANTEGNA'S highly spectacular inscenation of the Trial of St. James before Herod Agrippa in the Paduan Eremitani (Fig. 1) continues to strike us as impressively classical. Indeed, his performance here in particular is so convincing that we feel disposed to credit him with firsthand knowledge of categories of ancient monuments that could not have influenced European vision until classical archaeology had reached a far more advanced stage of development.¹ In an enterprising study of about fifty years ago, it was contended with some plausibility, inasmuch as the Arch of Constantine was accessible and is known to have attracted the attention of Renaissance artists, that the Trial of St. James was based on an Aurelian panel of the Arch with the Emperor accepting the submission of a captive Barbarian king.² A more recent study, while discounting the likelihood of a monumental Roman model for this scene and laying proper stress on the necessarily eclectic and basically numismatic nature of the artist's sources, has assumed access by the young Mantegna in Northern Italy to a very wide range of classical visual material.³ The present study aims at fixing Mantegna's point of view for his ambitious undertaking in the light of his archaeological resources, considered however beyond the limits that systematic historical thought has imposed on the field in modern times. It will accordingly go over much of this ground afresh, proceeding on the assumption that nothing should be classified as antique in immediate derivation that can be accounted for in other terms.