ANTONELLO da Messina

This late painting by Antonello was executed for private devotion.

Antonello painted two other versions of this subject-matter which are in Antwerp and Sibiu (Romania).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 22 minutes):

Heinrich Sch�tz: Die sieben Worte am Kreuz SWV 478

The painting represents Christ Crucified between two Evildoers, with Maria and John the Evangelist.

In the work of the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina the characteristics of 15th-century Flemish and Italian painting are combined in a very balanced way. Antonello, who lived in Naples from 1445, probably became acquainted with Flemish painting through works that were shipped from Bruges to Naples.

In addition to this Venetian painting influenced Antonello when he stayed in the Lagoon City in 1475. Elements of this synthesis are already present in the Antwerp Crucifixion.

A total of only 12 signed works by Antonello have been preserved. Ten of them are also dated. One of these is the Antwerp Crucifixion. The following text is written in tiny characters on a small piece of parchment on a piece of wood broken off from the crucifix in the left foreground: ‘1475 Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit.’

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Guillaume Dufay: Hymn for Easter

In the nineteenth century, this painting was believed to be by a fourteenth-century German painter. However, since 1902 the attribution to Antonello da Messina is universally accepted, and the panel is considered to be an early masterpiece of the artist. It is the earliest work in a stylistically related series on the subject of the Crucifixion, continued by the versions in London and Antwerp. In the version at Sibiu, Antonello portrays the landscape behind the Crucifixion - the city and the Strait of Messina - from a bird’s eye view, from an almost topographical perspective.

Among the pictures Antonello produced before his stay in Venice is the San Gregorio Polyptych. Its relationship to Netherlandish painting suggests that he was aware of certain examples in Naples where he worked, or that perhaps he may have visited the Lowlands.

The Madonna and Child is the central panel of the much damaged San Gregorio Polyptych.

The only work by Antonello still in Venice, where he resided in 1475 and 1476, it was probably painted at the beginning of his stay in the city. The splendid background scene, one of the best preserved parts of this very badly damaged painting, with the apse of the church of San Francesco d’Assisi in Messina, is the artist’s tribute to the city of his birth.

The painting is one of the portraits which were famed for their realism. Due to his knowledge of Flemish pictures, the painter had made a decisive contribution to the spreading and perfection in Italy of what was at that time the new medium of oil painting, and normally depicted figures in three quarter life-size as statue-like half-length portraits in front of a barrier. As in this portrait, the face is particularly emphasized by the dark background and simple headgear, with the eyes directed straight at the observer.

Tradition has it that when Antonello da Messina returned from Flanders he introduced the technique of oil painting to Venice. He was also influenced by northern painting in his Sicilian search for the individual character of people and things, as is evident from the extraordinary Portrait of a Man, circa 1475. His objective and incisive analysis of forms combines Piero della Francesca’s stereometric achievements, Mantegna’s use of perspective in his busts and Venetian colour. Its present state of preservation shows that the highlighting on the red robe, has now become blackened by the lead base of the white pigment.

By the 1470s Netherlandish pictures were being imported to Venice in great numbers, together with some of the Netherlandish-inspired portraits by Antonello da Messina. While Antonello’s portraits show less of the figure and the surrounding space than earlier Venetian examples, their sharp lighting from the left, strongly individualised expressions, and outward-turned eyes give them a powerful physical and personal presence.

The genre of portraiture was one of the most important and most enduring new developments of the Quattrocento. This portrait is notable for its use of oils; Antonello da Messina was one of the few 15th-century Italian artists who fully mastered this technique (in contrast to Flemish artists, who used oils on a regular basis). Since oil paint dries much more slowly than tempera, it allows the artist more time to execute the work, and also enables the colours to be applied with much greater fluidity and flexibility.

This portrait is one of the best among the (more than ten) portraits painted by Antonello. It is assumed that it represents a military commander.

This small painting is the only portrait by Antonello in which he placed the sitter in front of an expansive, atmospheric landscape instead of a plain dark background. It is his last and smallest portrait. The identity of the sitter, between twenty and thirty years old, has not been determined.

All of Antonello’s portraits depict men, who are shown bust-length and in three-quarter view. With one exception, the sitters are set against a dark, neutral background. In the group of his early portraits, painted before 1474, he experimented with pose, costume, and expression. The early panels were made in Sicily from the late 1460s onward with an analytical approach that reflects Antonello’s admiration for works by Netherlandish artists.

In the present portrait, the headgear of the unidentified young man indicates that he was part of the established Venetian community in Messina.

This portrait combine an Eyckian sharpness of focus and particularity with a Latin sense of classical stability and restraint.

This superb panel painting has been mistreated over the centuries, and to complicate matters, the artist himself had adjusted his original ideas, including a change in the placement of Christ’s right hand. The insistent frontality of the figure recalls Byzantine images. Antonello’s use of oil as a medium, a technique shared with Flemish painters, allowed him to produce more impressive trompe l’oeil effects like the cartellino applied to the bottom of the picture.

Left side: Saint Nicholas and Saint Maddalena, 56 x 35 cm

Center: Madonna, 115 x 65 cm

Right side: Saint Ursula and Saint Dominique, 56,8 x 35,6 cm

Little is known about the artist, except for what has been handed down by Vasari, and later by Ridolfi. The works are attributed to Messina above all because of the strength of the new style of painting, claimed to have been inspired by a journey to Flanders. Still, the artist had his first grounding in the South of Italy. It was certainly here that he brushed shoulders with the Flemish painters and grafted onto his painting a new visual dimension, using colours to broaden space into more airy vistas.

In 1475 he was staying in Venice and the San Cassiano altar-piece came as a sequel to a series of works, including the Antwerp crucifixion, and a number of portraits. Designed round a novel architectonic skeleton, this canvas came to be the inevitable model and paragon for all the prestigious painters of the age, from Bellini, with his San Giobbe altarpiece, to Giorgione, the painter of the Castelfranco altar, and Alvise Vivarini, whose altarpiece was destroyed in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum at Berlin in 1945.

This particular work of Antonello’s, which had so significant an influence on his artistic career, and also on the history of subsequent Venetian painting, disappeared from the Church of San Cassiano in the first decades of the 17th century. Ridolfi mentions it in 1648. Reduced to fragments, it reappeared in the collection of the Archduke Leopold William in Brussels, and was attributed to Giovanni Bellini. About this time, Teniers made copies and engravings of them. In 1700 three or so of the large fragments found their way to Vienna. The two side-wings remained unrecognised until 1928, when they were put on show by Wilde. The Madonna was displayed, attributed now to Bellini, now to Boccaccino (Wickhoff, 1893 and Berenson, 1916-17); the latter was the first to identify in this picture the centre-piece of the San Cassiano altar. Finally Wilde managed to trace the two lateral fragments and tried to reconstruct the whole (1929).

This ambitious altarpiece was probably Antonello’s most influential work. It has come down to us as a fragment, although by means of old copies, the sensible reconstruction indicates that even before Giovanni Bellini, Antonello produced a characteristically Venetian altarpiece.

The complicated problems of perspective of the architectural setting are solved excellently by the painter. The scene was also depicted in an engraving of D�rer.

This is a late work of Antonello showing Venetian influences. In the background typical Venetian buildings are depicted.

Antonello’s Saint Sebastian is an appealing picture which offers a wide range of visual stimuli. Seemingly oblivious to the arrows which pierce his body, the young Saint Sebastian is tethered to a tree, partially nude and in discreet contrapposto. The vanishing point is low on the horizon, so that the recession into space is sudden, if not dramatic, emphasized by the foreshortened column fragment in the right foreground.

The angel supporting Christ is not merely a passive observer, he experience grief just like human beings, as is movingly expressed by his weeping.

Antonello’s approach to portraiture combined a tight, accurate, particularizing style with an insight into the psychology of his sitter. In this area, too, he had a palpable impact on Giovanni Bellini, and the similarity of their styles has from time to time caused a shifting of attribution for certain portraits.

The painting is named for the Milanese collection to which it once belonged.