On this day in 1506, Andrea Mantegna died in Mantua, having served the Gonzaga family as court painter for close to fifty years. He was born in 1431, studied Roman ruins the way other men studied scripture, and married into the Bellini workshop in Venice.
Stand in the Camera degli Sposi and look up, as in the first image below. There is no hole in that ceiling. There is plaster, and a ring of painted stone balustrade, and blue with clouds moving across it, and faces leaning over the rim to look down at you: women, a figure in a turban, a peacock. Putti climb through the openings. One of them balances a tub of plants right at the edge, tipped just far enough that some part of you steps sideways. That joke is five hundred and twenty years old and it still lands. Around the oculus, illusionistic mouldings and wreaths of fruit, painted by a man who knew exactly how much a cornice weighs.
The same eye made the second picture: a dead Christ on a slab, seen from the soles of the feet, the body shortened toward you, the wounds plain, the mourners pressed to the left edge. Both pictures ask you to accept where you are standing. The ceiling lets you laugh about it. The other does not.
Spare a thought for whoever ground the blue and whoever built the scaffold in that little room.
Fabien, his burial chapel in Sant'Andrea sits in a church built around the relic of the Holy Blood, so pilgrims passed his door on their way to something else entirely. Endowments like his usually paid a priest to say masses and keep a lamp lit — the oil bought by the year, someone's job to trim the wick long after the painter was gone.
Fabien, that trick outlived him: painted theatre ceilings borrowed it wholesale, so the patrons in the stalls look up into a fake sky with figures leaning over the rim. Our house has a modest version, and I have watched plenty of people tilt their heads back during the interval rather than at the play.