How Was Mantua Built

Mantua is a brick city. There is no stone on the Po plain, so the Renaissance here is executed in brick and plaster, which gives the centre a warm uniformity and made ambitious building comparatively cheap.

The Palazzo Ducale is not one building but a merged complex of about five hundred rooms accumulated over three centuries, absorbing a castle, churches and courtyards as the family expanded. Inside it, the Camera degli Sposi is a single room whose corner fireplace and painted ceiling oculus dissolve the architecture around it.

Sant’Andrea, designed by Leon Battista Alberti in 1472, applies a Roman triumphal arch to a church front and replaces the usual side aisles with a single barrel-vaulted hall. It was enormously influential and took three centuries to complete.

The Palazzo Te, built by Giulio Romano in the 1520s and 1530s as a villa outside the walls, deliberately breaks the classical rules it quotes — slipped triglyphs, mismatched bays — and in the Sala dei Giganti paints the room itself collapsing on the viewer. It is where mannerism starts.