nobly. His strict justice and enlightened administration were not less notable than the military prowess by which he is best known. His arms were the terror of the Christians, and raised the Moslem power in Spain to a pitch it had never before attained. In Africa his armies were for a time hard pressed by the revolt of Zīrī, viceroy of Mauretania, but before his death this enemy had also fallen. Mansūr died at Medinaceli on the 10th of August 1002, and was succeeded by his son Mozaffar.
MANSURA, the capital of the province of Dakahlia, Lower
Egypt, near the west side of Lake Menzala, and on the Cairo-Damietta
railway. Pop. (1907), 40,279. It dates from 1221,
and is famous as the scene of the battle of Mansura, fought on
the 8th of February 1250, between the crusaders commanded
by the king of France, St Louis, and the Egyptians. The battle
was drawn, but it led to the retreat of the crusaders on Damietta,
and to the surrender of St Louis. Mansura has several cotton-ginning,
cotton, linen and sail-cloth factories.
MANT, RICHARD (1776–1848), English divine, was born at
Southampton on the 12th of February 1776, and was educated
at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford. He was elected
fellow of Oriel in 1798, and after taking orders held a curacy at
Southampton (1802), and then the vicarage of Coggeshall, Essex
(1810). In 1811 he was Bampton lecturer, in 1816 was made
rector of St Botolph’s, and in 1820 bishop of Killaloe and
Kilfenoragh (Ireland). In 1823 he was translated to Down and
Connor, to which Dromore was added in 1842. In connexion
with the Rev. George D’Oyly he wrote a commentary on the
whole Bible. Other works by him were the Psalms in an English
Metrical Version (1842) and a History of the Church of Ireland
(1839–1841; 2 vols.).
MANTEGAZZA, PAOLO (1831–1910), Italian physiologist and
anthropologist, was born at Monza on the 31st of October 1831.
After spending his student-days at the universities of Pisa and
Milan, he gained his M.D. degree at Pavia in 1854. After travelling
in Europe, India and America, he practised as a doctor in
the Argentine Republic and Paraguay. Returning to Italy in
1858 he was appointed surgeon at Milan Hospital and professor
of general pathology at Pavia. In 1870 he was nominated
professor of anthropology at the Instituto di Studii Superiori,
Florence. Here he founded the first Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnology in Italy, and later the Italian Anthropological
Society. From 1865 to 1876 he was deputy for Monza in the
Italian parliament, subsequently being elected to the senate.
He became the object of bitter attacks on the ground of the
extent to which he carried the practice of vivisection. His
published works include Fisiologia del dolore (1880); Fisiologia
dell’ amore (1896); Elementi d’ igiene (1875); Fisonomia e mimica
(1883); Le Estasi umane (1887).
MANTEGNA, ANDREA (1431–1506), one of the chief heroes
in the advance of painting in Italy, was born in Vicenza, of very
humble parentage. It is said that in his earliest boyhood Andrea
was, like Giotto, put to shepherding or cattle-herding; this is
not likely, and can at any rate have lasted only a very short
while, as his natural genius for art developed with singular
precocity, and excited the attention of Francesco Squarcione,
who entered him in the gild of painters before he had completed
his eleventh year.
Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a proportionate faculty for acting, with profit to himself and others, as a sort of artistic middleman; his own performances as a painter were merely mediocre. He travelled in Italy, and perhaps in Greece also, collecting antique statues, reliefs, vases, &c., forming the largest collection then extant of such works, making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others to study from, and then undertaking works on commission for which his pupils no less than himself were made available. As many as one hundred and thirty-seven painters and pictorial students passed through his school, established towards 1440, which became famous all over Italy. Mantegna was, as he deserved to be, Squarcione’s favourite pupil. Squarcione adopted him as his son, and purposed making him the heir of his fortune. Andrea was only seventeen when he painted, in the church of S. Sofia in Padua, a Madonna picture of exceptional and recognized excellence. He was no doubt fully aware of having achieved no common feat, as he marked the work with his name and the date, and the years of his age. This painting was destroyed in the 17th century.
As the youth progressed in his studies, he came under the influence of Jacopo Bellini, a painter considerably superior to Squarcione, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni and Gentile, and of a daughter Nicolosia; and in 1454 Jacopo gave Nicolosia to Andrea in marriage. This connexion of Andrea with the pictorial rival of Squarcione is generally assigned as the reason why the latter became alienated from the son of his adoption, and always afterwards hostile to him. Another suggestion, which rests, however, merely on its own internal probability, is that Squarcione had at the outset used his pupil Andrea as the unavowed executant of certain commissions, but that after a while Andrea began painting on his own account, thus injuring the professional interests of his chief. The remarkably definite and original style formed by Mantegna may be traced out as founded on the study of the antique in Squarcione’s atelier, followed by a diligent application of principles of work exemplified by Paolo Uccello and Donatello, with the practical guidance and example of Jacopo Bellini in the sequel.
Among the other early works of Mantegna are the fresco of two saints over the entrance porch of the church of S. Antonio in Padua, 1452, and an altar-piece of St Luke and other saints for the church of S. Giustina, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan, 1453. It’s probable, however, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione, including Mantegna, had already begun that series of frescoes in the chapel of S. Cristoforo, in the church of S. Agostino degli Eremitani, by which the great painter’s reputation was fully confirmed, and which remain to this day conspicuous among his finest achievements.[1] The now censorious Squarcione found much to carp at in the earlier works of this series, illustrating the life of St James; he said the figures were like men of stone, and had better have been coloured stone-colour at once. Andrea, conscious as he was of his own great faculty and mastery, seems nevertheless to have felt that there was something in his old preceptor’s strictures; and the later subjects, from the legend of St Christopher, combine with his other excellences more of natural character and vivacity. Trained as he had been to the study of marbles and the severity of the antique, and openly avowing that he considered the antique superior to nature as being more eclectic in form, he now and always affected precision of outline, dignity of idea and of figure, and he thus tended towards rigidity, and to an austere wholeness rather than gracious sensitiveness of expression. His draperies are tight and closely folded, being studied (as it is said) from models draped in paper and woven fabrics gummed. Figures slim, muscular and bony, action impetuous but of arrested energy, tawny landscape, gritty with littering pebbles, mark the athletic hauteur of his style. He never changed, though he developed and perfected, the manner which he had adopted in Padua; his colouring, at first rather neutral and undecided, strengthened and matured. There is throughout his works more balancing of colour than fineness of tone. One of his great aims was optical illusion, carried out by a mastery of perspective which, though not always impeccably correct, nor absolutely superior in principle to the highest contemporary point of attainment, was worked out by himself with strenuous labour, and an effect of actuality astonishing in those times.
Successful and admired though he was in Padua, Mantegna left his native city at an early age, and never afterwards resettled
- ↑ His fellow-workers were Bono of Ferrara, Ansuino of Forlì, and Niccolò Pizzolo, to whom considerable sections of the fresco-paintings are to be assigned. The acts of St James and St Christopher are the leading subjects of the series. St James Exorcizing may have been commenced by Pizzolo, and completed by Mantegna. The Calling of St James to the Apostleship appears to be Mantegna’s design, partially carried out by Pizzolo; the subjects of St James baptizing, his appearing before the judge, and going to execution, and most of the legend of St Christopher, are entirely by Mantegna.
