ANTONELLO da MESSINA. – Painter, born in Messina ca. 1430, died there in 1479. His activity begins to be known in 1457, when he received a commission for a painting in Reggio Calabria. The oldest work of his known to us dates from 1465, the Christ Blessing, now in the National Gallery in London. In 1475 A. was in Venice and there painted the altarpiece of St Cassian, now mutilated and preserved in the Museum in Vienna. At about the same time, Galeazzo Maria Sforza summoned him to Milan as a court portraitist. In 1478 he was in Messina and undertook to paint a gonfalon for S. Maria di Randazzo.
The artistic formation of A. is uncertain: in Naples he could certainly have become acquainted with Flemish art from originals and from local painters influenced by them, such as Colantonio, even without the journey to Flanders recounted by Vasari; the latter also attributes to him the merit of having introduced oil painting into Italy, which was already known there, however, and which only received wide diffusion from him. A. must also have known the works of Piero della Francesca and thus was able to overcome, through the study of perspective and a sense of volume, the particularism of the Flemish style so evident in his early St Jerome in the National Gallery in London.
This learning enriched A.’s pictorial language, which indeed set his portraits in a new and unusual manner in the 15th century, avoiding the traditional disposition of profile or full face and instead introducing the three-quarter view: this type became the norm for Italian portraiture and spread universally.
A very clear example of the artist’s sense of volume is the Martyrdom of St Sebastian in the Dresden Gallery; here A. seems to reduce, almost anticipating the most modern tendencies, the human figure to its essential values as a geometric solid; the limbs of the saint are firmly modelled according to a form tending towards the cylindrical, which is a most daring attempt, though well framed within humanist taste, at the mathematical stylization of reality. Yet the danger of fleeing from reality is overcome by A. through his innate sense of balance, and the purely stylistic conception is tempered by the reality of the object represented and, therefore, by the subject he has to render; the religious character of the painting is thus never lost sight of by the painter.
A.’s stay in Venice was decisive for the fate of that school of painting and also exercised an effective influence on Giambellino and Carpaccio: the influence of Mantegna gave way before A., who brought with him, even in the technique of oil painting, new refinements of colour which did not impair the solidity of form.
Among his other well-known sacred works are: the Annunciate in the Museum in Palermo; the Madonna and Saints in the Museum in Messina; the Annunciation in the Museum in Syracuse; the Crucifixion in Antwerp. His portraits are famous, such as the Condottiero in the Louvre, the Portrait of an Unknown in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. – See Pl. CXX.