Abstract
This essay examines Andrea Mantegna's later stylistic preoccupations in light of late fifteenth -and early sixteenth- century debates both on the arts (the paragone) and on literary language (the questione della lingua). It is argued that the particular hardness or sculptural quality remarked upon by his contemporaries, as well as by later critics and historians, may be seen as both an affirmation of art's capacity to endure, and as a deliberately artful (artificial) pictorial language. In this way it is comparable in function and effect to the classic model of Tuscan prose advocated by Pietro Bembo. The visible artifice of Mantegna's style thus places it in opposition to the universally pleasing, 'natural' language of art advocated by Leon Battista Alberti in the earliest years of Mantegna's life, and by Leonardo da Vinci during his final decades.
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