Page:Cyclopedia of painters and paintings - Volume I.djvu/97

 is doubtful. Probably first instructed in Sicily, where he worked for several years; went to Naples and saw an oil picture painted by Jan Van Eyck in the possession of King Alphonso of Aragon. Struck with the superiority of the new method he went to Bruges to study it, and in 1465 returned to introduce it into Italy. After remaining at Messina for about seven years, he went to Venice (1473) where he remained the rest of his life. That he there met Domenico Veneziano and taught him how to paint with an oil medium is doubtful, if not impossible, as that artist died in 1461 at Florence, and as neither he nor any other Venetian artist until long after 1465 painted otherwise than in tempera. It is also well to say that while we have no positive evidence that Antonello went to Flanders, it was not necessary for him to do so in order to learn the Van Eyck method, for not only were Flemish pictures brought into Italy, but several distinguished scholars and followers of Van Eyck, such as Roger van der Weyden, Memling, Hugo van der Goes, and Justus of Ghent worked in Italy about the middle of the fourteenth century. That Antonello was acquainted with the oil method, and influenced by the Flemish school, is evident in his earliest extant work (1465), The Saviour, National Gallery, London, as in a bust picture of the same subject (1470), in the Gaetano Zir Collection, Naples. A progress in technic is visible over these pictures in an altarpiece (1472) at S. Gregorio, Messina, which shows the same Flemish influence in drapery and use of gold. After 1473, when Antonello went to Venice, he painted three small portraits, one of which is lost, one was lately disposed of at the Hamilton sale, and one (1475) is in the Louvre, Paris, where it shines as a masterpiece of truth to life, intensity of expression, and exquisite finish. The small Crucifixion, Antwerp Museum, belongs to the same year. The portrait of a young man in the Berlin Museum (1478) is one of the finest of Antonello's pictures, and the first in which the flesh tints are clear like those of Gio. Bellini, instead of being of the reddish hue common to the Flemish school. The much restored St. Sebastian, Städel Institute, Frankfort, belongs to the same late Venetian period of Antonello's career, as do the Madonna (?) and the St. Sebastian, Berlin Gallery. There seems to be no doubt that this remarkable painter adopted and taught the Flemish system of painting, which gradually spread over Italy and raised oil to a level with fresco painting, and that through his manner and mode of representation he had great influence upon the technical development of Italian Art. As a portrait-*painter he was tacitly admitted by his contemporaries to be the originator of the models improved in subsequent years by the higher genius of Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian.—Meyer, Künst. Lex., ii. 118; Eastlake, Materials, 192; Lermolieff, 416; C. & C., N. Italy, ii. 77; Vasari, ed. Mil., ii. 563, 575; Gaz. des Beaux Arts (1862), 12; Ch. Blanc, École napolitaine; Lübke, Gesch. ital. Mal., i. 558.

ANTONELLO DA PALERMO, of Palermo, beginning of sixteenth century. Neapolitan school; son of the painter Antonio Crescenzio. In 1527 he was assistant to the sculptor Gazino, and in 1537 and 1538 he made copies of Raphael's Spasimo, now preserved in the Monastery of Fazello near Sciacca and in the Church of the Carmelites in Palermo. The only composition by which we can judge him is a Madonna dated 1528 in La Gangia of Palermo. It is of an attractive design and carefully finished, but faulty in execution.—C. & C., N. Italy, ii. 116; Di Marzo, Belle Arti in Sicilia, iii. 157; Meyer, Künst. Lex., ii. 128.

ANTONELLO DE SALIBA, of Messina, end of fifteenth and beginning of sixteenth century; either born in Messina or early settled there. Neapolitan school; formerly held to be identical with Antonello da Mes