ALCOBA ANDREA MANTEGNA
"NO-SMOKING" ROOM

This bedchamber was originally the kitchen of the home.   It has a queen bed.  Like all “Estrella de Belem” bedchambers, it has insulated windows, radiant heat floors, air conditioning, an LCD television, high-speed internet access, electronic safe and direct-dial telephone.  The furniture is French country style and is made of alder, a tree from the British Isles that the Celts and Scots believed was sacred.



The oil painting over the bed is a copy of “The Adoration of the Magi," painted by Andrea Mantegna in 1500.  It reflects the influence of the Venetian and Flemish schools.



Andrea Mantenga is one of the foremost north Italian painters of the 15th century. He made important contributions to the compositional techniques of Renaissance painting. The influence of both ancient Roman sculpture and the sculptor Donatello are clearly evident in Mantegna's rendering of the human figure.  Mantegna's principal works in Padua were religious. His first great success was a series of frescoes on the lives of St. James and St. Christopher in the Ovetari Chapel of the Church of the Eremitani (1456; badly damaged in World War II). In 1459 Mantegna went to Mantua to become court painter to the ruling Gonzaga family and accordingly turned from religious to secular and allegorical subjects. His masterpiece was a series of frescoes (1465-74) for the Camera degli Sposi (“bridal chamber”) of the Palazzo Ducale.  Mantegna's later works varied in quality. His largest undertaking, a fresco series on the Triumphs of Caesar (1489, Hampton Court Palace, England), displays a rather dry classicism. One of the key artistic figures of the second half of the 15th century, Mantegna was the dominant influence on north Italian painting for 50 years.