Within Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, the image of Christ has been similarly anamorphically manipulated in order to reconcile the idealized compositional and aesthetic harmony of the scene with the anatomical correctness of Christ’s body. Owing of the unusual viewpoint from which the viewer observed the recumbent Christ, adopting an intimate location at Christ’s feet, Mantegna’s composition yields a distortion in the body of Christ that is not proportionately or perspectively correct.
Mantegna used his masterful knowledge of perspective to alter the perceived spatial situation of the scene. If Mantegna had applied perspective as doctrine, then the resulting composition would have revealed an accurate index of the geometrically correct scene; however Mantegna altered the painting’s perspective so as to represent “what is there, and not what”. (Brisbin, 2010, Chapter 3)

Mantegna did not apply a purely mathematical and formulaic approach to composing the painting. Mantegna was applying Alberti’s concept of Historia * in order to offer a more dramatic and empathetic representation of the Dead Christ. Alberti’s Historia is imbued with “expressions, gestures and emotions of the figures … leaving more for the onlooker to ignore about his grief than he could see with the eye.” (Greenstein, 1992)

 
Fig. 1. Diagram showing the acute foreshortening of the painting - The overlaid circles expose the acute foreshortening

In Mantegna’s Dead Christ, the spectator’s emotions are clear: intimacy and shock (fig. 1). Mantegna’s manipulation of the canon of perspective has been executed in order to bring Christ’s head forward, so that it appeared closer in the foreground and therefore with a greater immediacy and intimacy than would conventionally be achieved had the painting simply been rendered through the systematized application of perspective alone.
The point here is that although perspective provides a very rigorous and definitive spatial framework through which to compose a pictorial artwork, Alberti himself had never proposed that it be used in such a formulaic way. It is through Alberti’s humanist desires, and in particular his acclamation of Historia as the overriding compositional technique and goal in painting, that artists were empowered with “moral worth which could be realized through a command of beauty, expression and significance.” (Brisbin, 2010, Chapter 3).

Mantegna’s Dead Christ is an example of the kind of pictorialism that began to develop late in the Renaissance that deployed Alberti’s system of perspective but denied its systematic control over the pictorial composition as a whole through the painter’s commitment to the composition’s Historia.

The horizontal plane is organized, traced out through a grid, with bodies arranged in a tableau of balanced gesture, posture, and mannerism.

The horizontal grid, therefore, is not just a means through which to allow for the operation of the perspective system but also a means to an end: the deployment of Historia. Mantegna here, according to Puttfarken (2000), applied the “perfect application of Alberti’s principles of composition: variety of movement, or expression, or gender and dress provides interest and pleasure, yet every part and every figure is geared to the ‘performance’, the representation of a single story.” (Puttfarken, 2000)

 Perspective, although used today and widely accepted as the fundamental representational structure in drawing and computer-based visualization, did not dominate as a definitive agent in Art for very long. Using the technique of perspective centre* (fig. 2), we can easily reach the same kind of perspective that Mantegna’s utilized. Just dividing the length of Christ’s body into eighths. These should correspond with the standard body proportions, with the lines falling roughly at chin, nipple line, navel, hip joint, and knees.  As you can see, they don’t.

Fig. 2. Perspectic Grid 

It is probable that Mantegna was using a double point of view (fig. 9-9a-9b). The first (blue lines) is relative to the marble bed, coinciding with the frame (green lines), the second (red lines) is just relative to the body of Christ. (Gherardi, 2009) Under a proper perspective Mantegna’s Christ would have been very awkward: tiny head and legs taking over most of the painting. But people are usually more interested in faces than feet, hence Mantegna struck a balance between dramatic foreshortening and showing the face of Christ.

Fig. 3. Double point of view used by Mantegna

 
       
    Fig. 3a. Double Point of view                                                 Fig. 3b. Relative Point of View

Robert Smith has demonstrated through photographs (Brisbin, 2010) that the figure of Christ corresponds to the proportions of a figure seen at a distance of 25 meters. The slab on which the figure is lying contradicts this calculation because it has the perspective scheme of a distance of approximately 2 meters. When a real figure is viewed at a distance of 2 meters the body’s proportion appears distorted; the size of the feet become very large when compared with the size of the head. One interpretation of this contradiction is that Mantegna did not apply the perspective distortion to the figure because it does not have the same linear qualities of the slab.