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The church of the Eremitani, was almost completely wrecked by an Allied bombing raid in 1944 and has been fastidiously rebuilt; the worst aspect of which was the near-total destruction of Mantegna 's frescoes of the lives of St James and St Christopher - the war's severest blow to Italy's artistic heritage. Produced between 1454 and 1457, when Mantegna was in his mid-twenties, the frescoes were unprecedented in the thoroughness with which they exploited fixed-point perspective - a concept central to Renaissance humanism, with its emphasis on the primacy of individual perception. The extent of his achievement can now be assessed only from the fuzzy photographs and the sad fragments preserved in the chapel to the right of the high altar. On the left wall is the Martyrdom of St James, put together from fragments found in the rubble; and on the right is the Martyrdom of St Christopher, which had been removed from the wall before the war.
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Western Europe
