‘Such a pleasant little sketch […] of this irritable artist’: Julia Cartwright and the Reception of Andrea Mantegna in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

Recent scholarship on the nineteenth-century serialized artists’ monograph has argued for a reassessment of this particular genre of art writing and its role in the development of art history as a discipline. Women art writers number prominently among the authors within such series, which proliferated in the English art press at the turn of the century. Significantly, many of their contributions form the first separate English-language study of several important quattrocento Italian old masters. Yet these artists, such as Luca Signorelli, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Andrea Mantegna, were for the most part considered unpopular and ‘difficult’ for the general public to appreciate. This may explain why, despite substantial foreign-language scholarship and Mantegna’s never-waning reputation as a ‘great’ artist, it was not until 1881 that he became the subject of a dedicated study in British art historical scholarship for the first time, with Julia Cartwright’s dual monograph Mantegna and Francia. Taking Mantegna as a case study, this article traces the various forms in which the artist became increasingly visible to the British public from the mid-century onwards via the practices of acquisition, display, reproduction, and travel, and how this visibility translated into Julia Cartwright’s monograph, in which she set out to reinvigorate the reputation of an artist well represented in British collections, but deemed distasteful to the Victorian eye. As earlier women writers such as Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Maria Callcott had successfully promoted the much-maligned Italian ‘Primitives’ to a wider British public, a later generation of women took advantage of gaps in English-language art criticism as they worked to establish themselves professionally in the face of an over-saturated British art press during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.