The historical coding of this story is given color and nuance by another body of information, drawn from Italian art.  It is quite remarkable that in a story about a revolutionist, a sketch less than 400 words long, we should encounter the names of Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca.  It is even more remarkable that we should encounter the name of a fourth painter--Andrea Mantegna--not once but three times.  The narrator and the revolutionist are in total disagreement about two things in the text: the future of the movement in Italy and their feelings about Mantegna's art.  The revolutionist's reaction to Mantegna is obviously significant to the narrator and to Hemingway, for it is reported in two phrases of startling symmetry: "Mantegna he did not like" and "he did not like Mantegna."  Why not?  And why is it important?  As we move from reading to interpretation, we can see that values in this story are organized around the opposition between the narrator and the revolutionist, which are in turn dependent upon such matters as their attitudes toward the revolution and toward Mantegna or the relative talkativeness of the revolutionist ("He talked about it a little") and taciturnity of the narrator ("I did not say anything").  The passivity or "patiency" of the revolutionist (he is imprisoned, tortured, exiled, "passed on" by the train men, taken into Romagna, told where to eat, and finally imprisoned again) is also contrasted with the activity or "agency" of the narrator, who goes "to see a man," writes out "the addresses of comrades," suggest a visit to the "Mantegnas in Milano," and, finally, tells the story we are reading.

At this point in our interpretation, the only mystery is Mantegna.  This is another place where the students need outside information in order to discuss the way the four painters figure in "The Revolutionist."  Among other things, it should probably be noted that Hemingway's narrator has mentioned them in strict chronological order: Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna.  Taken as a sequence, they might illustrate the growing mastery of illusionary technique in the Italian renaissance, especially the increasing concern for visual perspective in representation--but other painters could have been used for this.  The more the problem is considered, the more obvious it becomes that Mantegna has a special meaning for this narrator--and perhaps for Hemingway--that must extend beyond aesthetics and technique.  All four painters worked mainly with religious themes.  It might be possible to say that Mantegna was more preoccupied with martyrdom and hence with torture than the others, but they all painted scenes from the passion of Christ, for instance.  There is a clue, perhaps, in the mention of "Mantegnas in Milano."  Many of the finest Mantegnas were in Padua, where they were later destroyed in World War II, but in 1919, as at the present time, there was only one notable Mantegna in Milan--a virtuoso perspective view of the dead Christ, a greenish corpse laid out with his wounds highly visible: very human and very dead.

One could argue without further evidence that the naturalism of this painting must have appealed powerfully to the naturalist in Hemingway, who had ample opportunity to see this work when he was hospitalized and convalescent in Milan in 1918.  But there is further evidence (as Kenneth G. Johnston, in particular, has pointed out in an article called "Hemingway and Mantegna: The Bitter Nail Holes,").  There is evidence, at any rate, that throws considerable light on what Mantegna stood for in Hemingway's code.  This evidence is to be found in passages from two of Hemingway's novels: A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

                      

                    "Do you know anything about art?"
                    "Rubens," said Catherine.
                    "Large and fat," I said.
                    "Titian," Catherine said.
                    "Titian-haired," I said.  "How about Mantegna?"
                    "Don't ask hard ones," Catherine said.  "I know him though--very bitter."
                    "Very bitter," I said.  "Lots of nail holes."
                                           [A Farewell to Arms (1929), chapter 37)]

     At either of those places you felt that you were taking part in a crusade.  That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning.  You felt, inspite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion.  It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado.  It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.  It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty.  But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too.  You could fight.  [For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), chapter 18]

(Excerpted and Adapted from Robert Scholes' Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English, 44-46)