PADUA 



In the Madonna of Victory (Louvre), painted for 

 Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in 1495, to 

 celebrate the battle of Fornovo, he has introduced one 

 of those apses of fruit and flowers which he may have 

 designed as a background for some religious representa- 

 tion or secular triumph. Here parrots and a sulphur- 

 crested cockatoo are seen chained by the leg to the 

 foliage. This is a bird we are hardly prepared to find 

 in Italy in the fifteenth century, as it is peculiar to the 

 Australasian region. 



An AdoTLition (Florence, Uffizi) has about it a sugges- 

 tion of the stage. Possibly it is a recollection of scenery 

 which he had designed for a similar representation. In 

 it a camel is being brought down the practicable road- 

 way by a crowd of supers. The star and the banks of 

 angels have also a "property " appearance. 



The incongruity which we have noticed in other 

 religious pictures is very marked in the Christ's Agony 

 in the Garden (National Gallery) ; somehow we should 

 not have expected it from a painter of the monumental 

 gravity of Mantegna. But the shock which the ludicrous 

 play of the rabbits gives us does heighten the effect 

 of the supreme spiritual tension experienced alone by 

 the Saviour, as the Apostles, absolutely overcome, sleep 

 open-mouthed. Two of the rabbits face each other, 

 watching, ready to jump to this side or that according to 



lOI 



