Fictionality in Mantegna's San Zeno Altarpiece Structures of Mimesis and the History of Painting

and 1459 for the Benedictine monastery of San Zeno near Verona (fig. 1) has an important place in the traditional, style-oriented literature of art history. Above all, Mantegna is praised for his innovative composition, which uses linear perspective to fuse the three main panels of the altar into a single, illusionistic whole, a vista seen through the colonnade of the four carved columns of the frame.' This opinion rests on the assumption that the history of European art-at least into the middle of the nineteenth century-is concomitant with progress in the techniques of mimetic representation, that painting steadily improved in its ability to reproduce directly visual details of the external world. This naive view of the representational dimension of the image is supported by the concept of the iconic sign, first developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and propagated by Charles Morris. Here, the iconic sign is defined on the basis of its resemblance to an external referent. In the following study, I would like to examine pictorial mimesis as a phenomenon of fictionality, using a methodological approach based