Antonello da Messina, actually Antonio di Giovanni de Antonio (* c. 1429/1430 in Messina; † between February 14 and 25, 1479 in Messina) was an Italian painter who made a decisive contribution to the spread of the then new technique of resin oil painting in Italy in the mid-15th century.
He succeeded in balancing the light, mood and detail of Old Netherlandish painting with the monumental, rational spatiality of the Italian school. His portraits are famous for their vividness and psychological depth.
Throughout his career, he demonstrated a dynamic receptivity to the artistic impulses of the places where he lived. At the same time, he provided his own developments that contributed to the enrichment of the local school of painting.
In Venice in particular, his influence renewed local painting, where the pittura tonale emerged, characteristic of the Venetian Renaissance and characterized by an extremely soft and humane style.
Antonello da Messina's Life
Antonio di Giovanni d'Antonio was the son of Giovanni d'Antonio Mazonus, a stonemason from Messina, and his wife Garita (probably Margherita). His son Jacobo, called Jacobello d'Antonello, was his heir and also a painter. Antonio was buried in 1479 in the church of Santa Maria di Gesù Superiore in Messina. Antonio is known by his nickname Antonello da Messina, after his native city.
Antonello was a highly regarded painter during his lifetime, of whom few biographical details are known to this day. His year of birth in Messina can only be inferred from his age at death. According to Giorgio Vasari, the artist was only 49 years old when he died of consumption.
It is relatively certain that the young Antonello was apprenticed to the Neapolitan Colantonio around 1450, according to a correspondence between the humanist Pietro Summonte (1463-1526) and Marcantonio Michiel, dated 1524. Between 1450 and 1453 Antonello then worked in Naples, Messina, Palermo and in Reggio di Calabria. After completing his training, he returned to Messina in 1456.
The legend that Antonello da Messina learned his detailed painting technique with its precise materiality in the Netherlands from the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck and, after his return from Flanders, brought the oil painting he had perfected there (i.e., glazing the pictures painted with distemper with oil paints) to Italy belongs to the realm of fantasy.
An early painting of Christ of Flemish character in the National Gallery in London, which bears the date 1465, was long regarded as proof of this. Today, art historians largely agree that the dates of the van Eycks' and Antonellos' lives alone speak against this thesis.
It can be assumed that Antonello da Messina at least saw works by Rogier van der Weyden or Jan van Eyck in Italy and developed his own technique of oil painting. A meeting of Antonello (under the name Antonello da Sicilia) with the Flemish Petrus Christus in Milan at the beginning of 1456 is assumed to be possible.
A more recent, controversial thesis asserts an influence by the works of the Provençal school of painters around Enguerrand Quarton, present in Naples at the time of Antonello, who, however, presented themselves in a different artistic expression than Antonello.
It is possible to prove with certainty that Antonello and his family stayed in Amantea in Calabria in 1460 and in Messina before 1465 and then again in 1473-74. From 1474 to 1476 he probably stayed in Venice, initially for the altarpiece of San Cassiano.
Thanks to his new painting style, he quickly acquired a great reputation as a portrait painter and had contact with Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio. The fact that even today research into the exact dates of Antonello's life is hardly successful is a consequence of the destruction of the archives during the great earthquake of Messina in 1908.
Antonello's success in Venice is reflected in artist legends, according to which Bellini, for example, would have crept into his workshop driven by envy of his colleague. In fact, the majority of Antonello's surviving works come from this short creative period in the lagoon city.
Antonello da Messina's Work
Of the Pala di San Cassiano (1475), only the figures of the saints are preserved today (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Representations of the work have survived only in reduced size. Without this extremely large-scale work, the devotional paintings of Bellini and the school around Titian are almost unthinkable.
Other major works include the Annunziata (1474) in Munich, in 1475 another, more advanced Annunziata in the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia in Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, an Ecce homo (1473) in the Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza, a Crucifixion in Antwerp (Royal Museum of Fine Arts), the Condottiere, a male portrait, in the Louvre (both from 1475), a young man in the Berlin (1478), and a Saint Sebastian in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie.
Several of the portraits set themselves apart from the Flemish style of representation in the presence and openness with which the sitters present themselves to the viewer. The dramatic modulation of light and shadow in some works already announces an artistic conception that was developed to mastery much later by Caravaggio.
The Annunziata of Palermo represents a peculiarity in Renaissance painting. The angel of the Annunciation is not in the picture, Mary is depicted sitting behind an open book. The action is reflected solely in Mary's gestures and facial expressions.
According to Robert A. Gahl Jr. (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome), the book is supposed to be the Old Testament. The text alluded to, according to Gahl, is probably verse 14, chapter 7 of the Book of Isaiah, in which the birth of the Savior by a virgin is prophesied.