Portrait of a Man, by Antonello da Messina

The Mystery Man of Messina

Poor old Giorgio Vasari. He wrote biographies of more than 250 artists back in the 16th century, popularized the idea of “the Renaissance” and the term “Gothic”, and though he thought of himself as a painter and architect, became known to later generations as the “First Art Historian”. Being a painter and architect is tough enough, but if you’re the first art historian you can’t crib much material from other art historians, so I imagine that Giorgio was forced to rely a lot on gossip. I don’t mean that he didn’t try his best to find good sources and documents as he wrote his “Lives”; but there are clearly times when he filled in the gaps with dubious stories. For example, in his life of Andrea del Castagno, he accused Andrea of murdering Domenico Veneziano, even though Andrea had been dead four years when Domenico dropped off the twig from natural causes.

My favourite of Giorgio’s excursions into the fanciful concerns an early-Renaissance Sicilian painter named Antonello da Messina.

According to Vasari, Antonello was a journeyman painter who happened to see a picture by “Giovanni da Bruggia” at the court of King Alfonso of Naples. (Giovanni da Bruggia, better known to us as Jan van Eyck, was a Netherlandish painter famed for the deep and glowing colour of his works. Vasari even transports his readers to Bruges to observe how Giovanni – or Jan – came to invent oil-painting, boiling various nuts and seeds until he found the perfect medium for his pigments.)

Vasari says that as soon as Antonello saw the picture, he immediately travelled to Bruges, struck up a friendly relationship with Giovanni, winkled the secrets of painting in oils from him, and then returned home where he introduced his countrymen to this new and improved method of making pictures. Specifically, Vasari says that Antonello moved to Venice (that sinful city!) because of his “licentious habits”, and there he taught “Maestro Dominico” the techniques he had learned in Bruges. (“Maestro Dominico” was Dominico Veneziano, who, you will recall, was Andrea del Castagno’s supposed murder victim.)

Such was Vasari’s status as the First Art Historian that for centuries the story of Antonello’s mission to bring back Jan van Eyck’s secrets to Italy was popularly believed, even though Jan died in 1441 when Antonello was 11 years old. Besides the chronological problem, scholars also pointed out that Jan van Eyck, while certainly a master of the medium, was nevertheless not the inventor of oil paint. But the story was just too good to fade away.

So even though the academics found that some Italian artists had tried oil paints in the past, like the Ferrarese painter Cosmè Tura, Antonello still was credited by most people as the man who brought oil painting south to the Italian Renaissance. There is a certain amount of truth to the idea. He may not have visited the Low Countries, but somewhere, somehow, by the 1470s he had acquired a mastery of the oil medium equal to the great artists of the north, like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden; and of course he used an Italian invention that the Netherlandish artists hadn’t yet fully adopted: realistic perspective. His St. Jerome in his Study is a small miracle of exquisite illusion made utterly believable by the play of light from several sources. Also, he was among the first portraitists in Italy who posed his subjects full-face against a dark background, as the northern masters did, to better convey subtleties of character.

St. Jerome in his Study, by Antonello da Messina

So when he arrived in Venice in 1475 for a stay of less than two years, it seems he changed the direction of Venetian painting in a profound way, because it was at that time that the artists of la Serenissima, led by Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, began to use oils to create the luminous, atmospheric, and colour-filled works that defined the Venetian style forever after.

If Antonello didn’t travel to Flanders, how did he acquire his amazing skill in oils? It’s true that as a youth he was apprenticed in Naples to a minor painter named Colantonio, who is said to have admired Flemish art. Colantonio worked for Alfonso of Aragon, who owned paintings by both Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. And, too, Antonello is thought to have visited Milan. There, at the court of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, he may have worked with Petrus Christus, a pupil of Jan van Eyck.

All these things may explain his extraordinary achievements. Or perhaps he was simply one of those prodigies, like Mozart, who appear from time to time with abilities that defy explanation. And after all, perhaps he did travel to Bruges, without anybody noticing.

By chance, I found an article in the January 1872 edition of The Edinburgh Review, in which the author (hoping to bolster Vasari’s story), claims that he found evidence that the name Jan –“Giovanni” in Italian – was actually a misreading of Hans, and that Vasari really was referring to Hans of Bruges instead of Giovanni da Bruggia; and who else could Hans of Bruges be but that great master of oil painting, Hans Memling, who died in 1499, and who could have taught Antonello all those precious secrets.

I’d like to believe it, but … well … Vasari wouldn’t make a mistake like that ... would he?