![]() Mantegna painted several versions of this theme, however, for the most part these works are now available, if at all, only as drawings or engravings. The emotional tension of the scene culminates in dialogue between these two figures. He turns his face and hands towards Christ. Christ bends towards one of the patriarchs emerging from the depth of Hell and whose cloak, caught by the wind, surrounds him like a halo. The composition seems crowded, largely because the upper and left-hand edges have been cut. Thus, to the left in Mantegna's painting we have the first human couple, Adam and Eve, the two who, through Original Sin begin the story of Christ's Passion. They are not damned, but cannot ascend into heaven until the coming of Christ. Limbo is a neutral zone of Hell where the souls of the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets reside. The story of Christ's descent into Limbo does not appear in the Bible, but in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and also in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus da Voragine. All date to an earlier moment in Mantegna’s work, but the Accademia Carrara’s panel could prove to be a later addition.(b. Among the paintings identified with the decorative scheme to date are the Museo del Prado’s Death of the Virgin its missing upper fragment, Christ with the Soul of the Virgin, in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara and the Uffizi’s triptych’s panels: The Adoration of the Magi, The Ascension of Christ and The Circumcision. Mantegna decorated the private chapel for the Gonzaga family in the early 1460s it was destroyed in the 16th century. “We have speculated on a provenance from the lost chapel of the Castle of St George in Mantua,” Valagussa says. One theory under consideration-for a show Valagussa is planning next year to reunite the Resurrection and the Descent-is that the Bergamo panel relates to the Mantegna triptych in the Uffizi in Florence, which was itself reunited in the 19th century. Valagussa believes that the divided paintings may have formed the wing of a polyptych altarpiece. It must have been vertical, given the location of the nails.” It could, however, be the trace of a frame applied before painting to reinforce the panel, which is just 8mm thick. ![]() “I thought of a crossbar that had been removed, but the position was totally anomalous. “No one had been able to observe that minuscule cross.” Another detail caught his eye: on the back, halfway up, are two sawn-off nails. How could such a work have been forgotten? “There wasn’t even a colour photograph,” Valagussa says. Giovanni Agosti, the art historian who co-organised the Louvre’s Mantegna show in 2008 and is one of the few to have seen the Bergamo painting in the flesh, also backed the new attribution. The authorship of that work has never been doubted since it resurfaced in the 20th century it was sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2003 for $28.6m. The Bergamo panel, obscured by old varnish and restorations, could be reattributed to Mantegna and to the same painting as The Descent into Limbo (1492). Valagussa contacted Keith Christiansen from the European paintings department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who replied enthusiastically within minutes. I compared with paintings of that subject of the same size, and when I put it next to Mantegna’s Descent into Limbo on Photoshop, I discovered that the rocky arch divided between the two panels matched up perfectly.” “I thought the most likely scene was a Descent into Limbo. While compiling an entry on the painting for the museum’s new catalogue of 14th- and 15th-century paintings, Valagussa noticed that a cross painted in gold at the panel’s lower edge, between the rocks, “obviously belonged to another painting”, he says. After the Second World War, the Accademia put the panel in storage as a Mantuan painter’s copy after Mantegna. It depicts the Descent into Limbo of Jesus Christ. In 1910, it was classified as a studio work and in 1912, the expert Bernard Berenson listed it among the “copies of lost works”. Descent into Limbo is a 1492 tempera and gold on panel painting by Andrea Mantegna, now in the Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection in Princeton, New Jersey. A few years later, however, the art historian Giovanni Morelli and others contested the attribution, seeing the painting as “ruined by restoration”. The work had been acquired in 1846 and its attribution to Andrea Mantegna was confirmed by Charles Eastlake, the first director of London’s National Gallery. ![]() ![]() In May it was announced that the curator Giovanni Valagussa had re-examined the Accademia’s forgotten panel of the Resurrection of Christ (around 1492-93) and found it to be an original Mantegna. The €40,000 restoration, sponsored by the Rotary Club of Bergamo South, will remain public throughout September and is expected to continue until November. On Wednesdays and Saturdays since early August, visitors to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo have been able to watch conservator Delfina Fagnani at work on its “new” Mantegna.
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