Andrea Mantegna and Devotional Meditation: Interpreting the Man of Sorrows with Two Angels (Copenhagen)

Although Andrea Mantegna’s Man of Sorrows with Two Angels (c. 1490-1500) has been characterized as an ‘Iconoclastic Andachtsbild,’ I concentrate on its potential reception within devotional meditations of its intended patron, most likely a member of the prominent Valenti family in Mantua. Mantegna exploited implications of the Cristo passo type, in which the dead Christ either might be supported by mourners or might stand or sit alone, inexplicably erect as though in a state of suspended animation: his Christ, seated as though enthroned on the edge of a sarcophagus that implies an altar and extending his wounded hands toward a viewer, thus can be seen to exist in a state between death and the uncompleted process of Resurrection. In combination with myriad references to stony imagery, Mantegna’s Christ evokes the notion of the scriptural lapis angularis interpreted in well-known exegeses by Augustine, Bede, and others as an architectural corner-stone, key-stone, or coping-stone. As such, it intimated Christ both as Resurrected Redeemer and as Living Stone and head of the spiritual Church, in contrast to the vignette in the painting’s background of stonecutters laboring at production of physical material intended simply for a terrestrial monument.