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Artist: Andrea Mantegna (Isola di Carturo, near Vicenza, c. 1431 – Mantova, 1506)
Year: 1470-85
Technique: burin
Dimensions: 25 x 35,2 cm

Catalogue raisonné: Martineau 79

Two tritons, each with a Nereid riding on his back, are fighting. One is armed with a bone; the other uses an animal skull as a shield. In the background, a full-length triton blows a horn and parries a blow about to be struck by an enemy armed with fish.

Between these two pairs, isn’t there a generation that separates them? The youthfulness of the merman and the Nereid on the left seems to challenge and replace the established order maintained until then by this merman—still strongly built but already showing signs of aging, as does his companion. I would therefore readily interpret this as a scene in which one order fades away and a new one begins, to the victorious sound of the horn.

This extremely rare engraving makes a very beautiful impression; it is one of Mantegna’s graphic masterpieces, so admired by Dürer that he created a pen-and-ink drawing based on this engraving, dated 1494.

Mantegna seems to have taken so few impressions from his prints that even in 1494 Albrecht Dürer could not get one for himself and had to draw a copy. Some elements of Dürer’s drawings of this work were used by Hans Sebald Beham for a wallpaper frieze, which in turn acted was source for an ornamental panel by Master C.G. in 1537, an example of the manner in which designs could be transmitted across media.

V&A

Printed on unwatermarked laid paper, the plate was re-engraved in the 16th century. However, unlike other engravings by Mantegna and his collaborators, the left and right plates of The Battle of the Sea Gods were not sent to France to be printed there.

Our print is identical to the one in the French National Library, whose watermark is similar to Briquet 13900—that is, Italian paper from the first half of the 16th century.

For a comparable print of both the right and left plates, see the copy held at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This print, almost one metre wide, is by far the largest and most ambitious produced by the 1470s, and an apt response to Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Nude Men.

David Landau, in Martineau (dir.), Andrea Mantegna, Londres et New York, Olivetti et Electa, 1992, p. 287.