Just to prove Joanna keeps her promises…
Some time ago, when blogging about Palladio, I promised a future blog showing the amazing art in the palaces in Mantua. This is the promised blog. And this is the exterior of the ducal palace. Looks quite plain and austere, doesn’t it?
But I haven’t shown you the inside yet.
Prepare to goggle. Possibly to the point where you can’t cope with any more bling. That was certainly the case for me.
Mantua and the Gonzaga family
Mantua is in northern Italy, about halfway between Milan and Venice. In the Renaissance, under the rule of the Gonzaga dynasty (from 1328 until 1627) Mantua was a very rich powerhouse of art. (The main branch died out in 1627, followed by a cadet branch which effectively went extinct in 1708. Mantua then became part of the Habsburg Empire.)
For those three centuries until 1627, the Gonzaga family lived a very high life, with each new ruler vying to outdo his predecessors by extending the palaces and adding even more artworks. The palazzo ducale now has over 500 rooms and extends to over 35,000 square metres. It is vast. We saw only a fraction of it and it was overwhelming. Here are some images to give you an idea of what the ducal palace is like inside.
The ceiling in the Hall of the Labyrinth (above) features an inscription about Francesco II Gonzaga who fought against the Turks at Kanizsa in Hungary.
This is just one of the magnificent coffered ceilings in the ducal palace. When there are 500 rooms like this, visitors get a bit blasé about their magnificence after the first dozen or so. But what about those blank spaces on the walls? What used to be there?? (More of that later.)
The image below is of the Gonzaga family in adoration of the holy trinity, painted by Rubens in 1604-5. You can see obvious damage in my photo. The painting was originally a tryptich. During the Napoleonic Wars, the painting was split — you can see that line across the centre — and the outer paintings (of the transfiguration and of the baptism of Christ) were mostly lost.
What about the exterior of the ducal palace?
The ducal palace wasn’t just decorated inside. It included seven gardens and eight courtyards as well. Here are 2 views of one of them, called the Giardino dei Semplice (garden of simples). Those are, of course, “simples” in the historical sense of medicinal herbs and nothing to do with simpletons or even meerkats 😉
Here’s another of those 7 gardens. The colonnades are very attractive, as is the cupola, but it looks pretty ordinary as ducal gardens go… Don’t you think?
Nope. This is the famous Hanging Garden, built in the 16th century for Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga. It looks normal except that it is twelve metres above ground level. That is about forty feet in old money. Just imagine the logistics of creating a garden forty feet up in the air. How much depth of soil for the plants’ roots? What did it weigh? How was it supported? And watered? Astonishing. And all created by hand and human muscle, about five centuries ago. At a time when labour was cheap and, for the Gonzagas, money was no object.
Gonzaga pleasures
Revelry is often referred to by the shorthand “wine, women and song”. I don’t know about the song, but I’m pretty sure that wine (and feasting) played a big part in Gonzaga high life. We were told that the Gonzagas’ greatest pleasures were horses, art, women, and gambling.
For a start, the Gonzagas liked to ride their horses inside the palace. Below, on the left, you can see the tower entrance. The image on the right shows the shallow steps leading up from ground level, with figures for a sense of scale. The staircase was designed so that Gonzaga men could ride their horses up it. And apparently they did.
The Gonzagas were great horse breeders. In the early 16th century, Federico II Gonzaga built stables outside the city walls and, a few decades later, converted the stables into a new leisure palace, the Palazzo Te. Frescoes cover almost all the interior walls. Some of the most famous are in the hall of horses (Sala dei Cavalli). Lots of trompe l’oeil here, and the horses look amazingly real, I thought. Judge for yourself. (But don’t overlook that astonishing ceiling.)
More Gonzaga art, money no object?
The Palazzo Te, we were told, was also a site of great revelry and where the ruling Gonzaga would keep various mistresses. His wife and legitimate offspring, meanwhile, lived in the Palazzo Ducale. None of that would have been cheap, of course, but the Gonzaga dynasty could afford it.
Here, for example, is part of the ceiling of the chamber of the sun and the moon, in the Palazzo Te. It shows Apollo driving the chariot of the sun and Diana the chariot of the moon.
You do get a very good view of the horses’ backsides, and also Apollo’s. Perhaps, as this was a more private room, it was considered acceptable to be a bit bawdy?
The lozenges surrounding the central fresco (192 of them!) include figures from classical myths, taken from coins and cameos in the extensive Gonzaga collections. No expense spared, it seems.
Above is another spectacular ceiling, this time from the Chamber of the Winds in the Palazzo Te.
And another, this time from the Loggia of David in the Palazzo Te. The larger lunette on the right shows David and Goliath; the smaller one shows David fighting a lion. Other paintings, not in this image, show Bathsheba bathing or at her toilette. The palace information suggests those were a joke, referring to the death of the husband of Federico’s mistress, just after she had borne Federico a child. Some joke, eh?
All this art made an impression on visiting bigwigs. When the Emperor Charles V visited the Palazzo Te in 1530, he elevated Federico II Gonzaga from Marquess to Duke of Mantua.
Bling with side benefits?
Mantua and Mantegna
One of the most famous artists who worked for the Gonzaga dynasty was Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506) and the Palazzo Ducale still includes examples of his work.
Above is a reproduction of one of the walls in the Wedding Chamber (Camera degli Sposi). It contains some of Mantegna’s most famous frescoes. That is a full-height door in the middle of the wall, which gives an idea of just how large the frescoes are. The trompe-l’oeil is amazingly real when you see it. Look at all those putti pulling back the curtain. It’s difficult to tell where the real room (the door and its frame) ends and the fresco begins.
And if you look very closely at the frieze to the right of the door, you can find the face of Mantegna himself.
It’s difficult to see, I admit, so here is my close-up picture of the real thing. That’s him, in the middle of the column, but I’ve added an arrow so you can make him out. It may help if you click to enlarge the image.
This is the fresco above the huge stone fireplace in the Wedding Chamber:
There’s a fabulous ceiling here, too. This one has a trompe l’oeil oculus, with cheeky putti all round it. Can putti be bawdy? Looks like it, here. And yes, those cameos surrounding the oculus are various emperors of Rome (including Caligula, here given his proper name, Gaius).
Bankruptcy happens — gradually, then suddenly
That was how Hemingway described going bankrupt in an exchange in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. But it would also have been an appropriate description of the Gonzaga dynasty in the early 17th century.
The dynasty was short of male heirs.
When Duke Francesco died in 1612 with no son, his younger brother Ferdinando gave up being a cardinal (!!) and became Duke of Mantua. He did marry but he produced no male heirs either and was succeeded by his brother Vincenzo II, who also gave up his cardinal’s hat for the dukedom. Vincenzo II lasted only a year or so before he, and the main Gonzaga line, died out.
During that period, the Gonzagas effectively became bankrupt. Too much spending on art, horses, women, architecture. Too much gambling. (Apparently there was a lot of gambling.)
So by 1625, Duke Ferdinando was desperately negotiating with Charles I of Britain for the sale of the Gonzaga art collection. It included works by an astonishing range of artists, including Brueghel, Correggio, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese. Most of it went to London in the late 1620s for the then enormous sum of £25,000. That left the palaces bare since the fabulous furniture went along with paintings, sculpture and the rest. What remained was the fabric of the buildings, including frescoes, coffered and painted ceilings and more. Plus, interestingly, the tapestries. Why? Because, in those days, tapestries were not considered to be “art”, but just a way of keeping the cold out. But they’re rather more than a Renaissance equivalent of lined curtains, don’t you think? [Click to enlarge images below.]
Most people know that Charles I was a great art collector. Unfortunately for Britain, Oliver Cromwell wasn’t. When he took power, he sold almost all of the Gonzaga collection and it is now spread around galleries throughout the world. About the only part of the collection that Cromwell didn’t sell was the set of nine large paintings by Mantegna entitled The Triumphs of Caesar. Perhaps Cromwell kept them because they celebrated another general, like himself, rather than a religious or monarchical subject? It’s impossible to know. But they, at least, are still in the UK, at Hampton Court Palace.
Rigoletto and Mantua bling
What has Verdi’s opera Rigoletto got to do with all this Mantua bling? Well, the version of the opera we see on stage is set in Mantua but there’s an interesting story behind how it got there.
Verdi wanted to base his new opera on Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse [the king has fun]. Unfortunately for Verdi, Hugo’s play had been banned after only a single performance, in 1832. The play, set in the 1520s, features the profligate and licentious King Francis I of France and his jester, Triboulet. So why ban it in the 19th century? Apparently, the French government saw it as criticising King Louis-Philippe, so it had to go.
In 1850, Verdi had been hoping to get away with using Hugo’s play for his opera (working title La Maledizione). And La Fenice, the Venice opera house which commissioned it, thought he would. After all, it was nearly 20 years since the play had been performed.
They were both wrong. The Austrian censor banned it as “a repugnant [example of] immorality and obscene triviality”.
Time for a rethink?
Verdi and his librettist, Piave, revised the work and by early 1851, they’d reached a compromise with the censors. The licentious king became a licentious Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua — since the dukedom no longer existed and the Gonzaga family had been extinct for centuries, that was unlikely to offend anyone — and the more titillating scenes were toned down. La Maledizione became Rigoletto and premiered in March 1851. The opening night was a triumph.
Rigoletto set in Mantua — live on location
I was reminded of the history of Rigoletto because I remember watching, and admiring, the 2010 performance of the opera in Mantua. It was a live performance, using the actual locations and timings set down in Piave’s libretto. The performance starred Placido Domingo as Rigoletto, Julia Novikova as Gilda, and Vittorio Grigolo as the Duke of Mantua.
In the UK, BBC 2 broadcast the live performance. (Sadly, it is not available on the iPlayer.) The locations used included the Palazzo Ducale and the Palazzo Te in all their blingy magnificence. The Opera Today review, which is well worth a read, said this about the settings:
“Real Renaissance staircases and hallways, real marble parquets. Frescoes painted by 15th and 16th century masters. Real antique tapestries and furniture. No opera house workshop would even dream of competing with Mantegna or Corregio. Design doesn’t get more perfect than this.”
You’ll find a short clip if you click on the image above from PBS Great Performances. The clip includes some fleeting shots of frescoes and of one of the astonishing Mantua ceilings. And you can see additional stills from the production here including a ball in the hall of the horses in the Palazzo Te. Definitely worth a look. Enjoy.
All the images in this blog are Joanna Maitland’s own, except where otherwise attributed.
Good grief, Joanna, you must have been giddy after looking at all those incredible ceilings. The mind boggles at the amount of time and the incredible skill that it must have taken to create them. Absolutely agree about the horses. They look real enough to whinny. And thank you for the all too brief glimpse of Placido Domingo.
Thanks Liz. I’d like to go back for a slower look. It is worth the investment of time I’d say. And that performance of Rigoletto was wonderful.