ABSTRACT
Reconstructing the events which had led to the mutilation of Mantegna’s Dormitio Virginis, Roberto Longhi was to observe that “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, predominant taste, which was decorative and courtly par excellence, adjusted itself to the mutilation of paintings with the same spirit as it hurried to enlarge them with additions (please note the many clumsy enlargements of Venetian pictures in the Louvre or the Prado, etc.): that is, on every occasion, for the most banal requirements of the distribution or architecture of a gallery, whether to make related paintings of different formats ‘go’ together, or to fit in with the scheme and the dimensions of the plasterwork, or the mouldings, or even to make the painting fit as a decorative panel over a door, and so forth.”
