Council of Mantua (1459)

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The Council of Mantua of 1459[1] was convoked by Pope Pius II, who had been elected to the Papacy in the previous year and was engaged in planning war against the Turks, who had taken Constantinople in 1453. His call went out to the rulers of Europe, in an agonized plea to turn from internecine warfare[2] to face Christendom's common enemy.

[edit] Process of the Council of 1459

Julius was in Mantua by 22 January; his long progress to the place of assembly resembled a triumphal procession. He opened the council on the first of June and waited in Mantua as the guest of Ludovico Gonzaga until September for the various representatives to assemble. On 26 September he called for a new crusade against the Ottomans. The refugee Cardinal Bessarion and Nicholas of Cusa were in attendance. The Duke of Burgundy was represented at the Council by the duke of Clèves, who brought in his train the young Burgundian cleric Ferry de Clugny. The painter Mantegna had been invited to Mantua by Ludovico in 1457; now, still remaining in Padua, he painted the Agony in the Garden that is in the National Gallery, London, for its Podestà; in Mantegna's picture, the disciples sleep in Gethsemane, while Jerusalem is envisaged as Constantinople, with the rising crescent moon signifying its capture by the Turk.[3].

[edit] Criticism and effects

Not all the leaders of the Church were in favour of a Crusade. The Venetian Cardinal Ludoviso Trevisano, patriarch of Aquileia, met Pius in Siena, 16 March, and followed the pope to Mantua, although he opposed the aims of the Council.[4]

By the time the Council was disbanded in January 1460, an ineffectual call for a new crusade against the Infidel had been decided upon, and proclaimed by Julius on 14 January. The paper crusade was to last for three years; it was to prove ineffectual.

Historians of the Tarot like Heinrich Brockhaus[5] have asserted that the so-called Tarocchi di Mantegna were devised and made during the sitting of this council.

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ There was a Council of Mantua in 1064 and a Council of Mantua in 1537.
  2. ^ Though the Wars in Lombardy had been ended by the Peace of Lodi (1454), England was convulsed in the Wars of the Roses, and the Thirteen Years' War was pitting the Prussian cities and the local nobility against the Teutonic Knights, whose support would be crucial in any concerted action against the Turk.
  3. ^ J. H. Whitfield, "Mantegna and Constantinople" The Burlington Magazine 119 No. 886 (January 1977), p. 41.
  4. ^ Salvador Miranda, "The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church": Ludovico Trevisano
  5. ^ Brockhaus, "Ein edles Geduldspiel: "Die Leitung der Welt oder die Himmelsleiter" die sogenannten Taroks Mantegnas. Vom Jahre 1459-60" Miscellanea di Storia dell'arte in onore di Igino Benvenuto Supino, (Florence) 1933,pp 397-416 (On-line text (German)). "Placed edge to edge, they form a symbolic ladder leading from Heaven to earth", wrote Jean Seznec (The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Princeton University Press, 1940:139).