ANTONELLO DA MESSINA. - Painter, b. at Messina ca. 1430, d. there in 1479. His activity begins to be known in 1457, when he received a commission for a painting for Reggio Calabria. His earliest work 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 S. Cassiano, preserved in a mutilated state in the Museum of Vienna. In the same period Galeazzo Maria Sforza summoned him to Milan as court portraitist. In 1478 he was at Messina and undertook to paint a banner for S. Maria di Randazzo.
A.'s artistic formation is uncertain: at 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; who also credits him with having introduced oil painting into Italy, which instead
was already known there and from him received only wide
diffusion. A. must also have known the works of Piero
della Francesca and thus was able, through the study
of perspective and a sense of volume, to overcome the
Flemish particularism so evident in the youthful St. Jerome
of the National Gallery in London.
(property of B. Degenhart)
This apprenticeship enriched A.'s pictorial language,
which in fact set out his portraits in a new
and unusual manner for the Quattrocento, avoiding the traditional disposition in profile or full face and introducing instead the
three-quarter representation: 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 very modern
tendencies, the human figure to its essential values of a solid
geometric body; the saint's limbs are firmly modeled
according to a tendentially cylindrical form, which is
a most daring attempt, moreover well framed within
humanistic taste, at mathematical stylization of
reality. But the danger of flight from the real is overcome by A.
through his innate sense of balance, and the purely
stylistic conception is tempered with the reality of the
object represented and, therefore, with the subject he
must render; the religious character of the painting, accordingly,
is never lost sight of by the painter.
A.'s stay in Venice was decisive for the fate
of that painting and worked effectively also upon Giambellino and upon Carpaccio: the influence of Mantegna yielded
before A., who brought with him, also through the oil
technique, new refinements of color, which did not undermine
the firmness of form.
Among A.'s other sacred works the best known are: the Annunciata of the Museum of Palermo; the Madonna and Saints
of the Museum of Messina; the Annunciation of the Museum of
Syracuse; the Crucifixion of Antwerp. Famous are his
portraits, such as the Condottiere of the Louvre, the Portrait
of an Unknown Man of the Galleria Borghese in Rome. - See
Pl. CXX.
