Battle of the Sea Gods: Right Half of a Frieze (1470/1500): Artwork and History

Battle of the Sea Gods: Right Half of a Frieze (1470/1500) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Workshop of Andrea Mantegna Italian, 1431-1506.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Andrea Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods may be the first print with a unified composition occupying more than one sheet. Unlike the Andrea Andreani Triumph of Caesar (1926.452.2–9) and the engravings after the same Mantegna paintings by his own workshop, this mythological frieze has only one seam and no disguising columns. Albrecht Dürer drew a copy of the right half of the frieze in 1494, already establishing the seminal importance of the work in the Renaissance.

Object facts

• Title: Battle of the Sea Gods: Right Half of a Frieze
• Date: 1470/1500
• Artist attribution: Workshop of Andrea Mantegna Italian, 1431-1506
• Place of origin: Italy
• Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper, discolored to grayish brown
• Dimensions: Image/sheet: 28.1 × 39.4 cm (11 1/8 × 15 9/16 in.); Composite approx: 28.3 × 80.9 cm (11 3/16 × 31 7/8 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.1013

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.