In the footsteps of Antonello da Messina : the Antonelliani between Sicily and Venice

Abstract

One of the most remarkable traces that we have for Antonello da Messina does not concern an artwork, but rather the artist’s homeward passage across the Straits of Messina in 1460, organized by his father and accompanied by his extended family: wife, children, siblings, in-laws, and servants. This vignette encapsulates the twin themes of family and travel that Charlene Vella’s new book expands to encompass the fortunes of Antonello’s workshop and followers, the so-called antonelliani, in the decades after the master’s early death in 1479. There is a long tradition of using travel to explain the exceptionality of Antonello. Vasari famously sent him to Flanders to learn the art of oil painting from Jan van Eyck. A more recent, but equally unfounded, proposal places him in Heraklion in Venetian Crete in 1445-46, where he could have absorbed very different lessons from Byzantine icons. The Cretan documents do record an Antonello da Messina, but there are no indications that this Sicilian traveller was a painter. Antonello was a common enough Christian name in Messina, the master’s own nephew (helpfully distinguished by Vella as ‘Antonio’) signed himself in identical fashion. In any case, Antonello had no need to travel to learn about icons: as Gervase Rosser has persuasively argued, Renaissance Messina preserved a rich tradition of icon veneration which Antonello was alert to in his artistic practice. Vella carries the themes of family and travel forward to the generation that followed Antonello’s path, continued his artistic legacy, and inherited his workshop. With his nephews Antonio and Pietro we voyage from Sicily to Venice, where the brothers traded on their uncle’s name and works, but also forged connections with Giovanni Bellini’s artistic circle. With Antonio we return to Sicily, and thence to Calabria and Malta, advancing deep into the Cinquecento. For Pietro we have a ghostly documentary trace in Genoa from 1501. The ties of family, strategically expanded and further cemented by marriage, evidently constituted the glue that held the core network together and facilitated this degree of connectivity across the Renaissance Mediterranean. It included Antonio’s and Pietro’s father, the woodworker and frame-maker Giovanni da Saliba, and their cousin Salvo d’Antonio, whose semi-independent workshop Vella examines in a dedicated chapter. The family’s reach was extended by intersections with other networks: an Umbrian merchant based in Venice whose exceptionally well-preserved altarpiece is now in Spoleto; the Franciscan Observants who commissioned a chain of polyptychs from Antonio in Sicily, Calabria and Malta in much the same way that their confrères in the Marches had patronised the Crivelli family a generation before. But this network did have an enduring centre: wherever they travelled, the family signed themselves as ‘da Messina’. Part of the challenge of recovering the antonelliani is to transcend the historical erasure of the devastating 1908 maremoto to reimagine this Sicilian harbour city as one of the great mercantile and cultural hubs of the Renaissance Mediterranean. Scholars should be grateful for the archival transcriptions made by Gaetano La Corte Cailler and Gioacchino Di Marzo just a few years before the catastrophe, without which the present book could not be written, but they also tantalize with their glimpses of the documentary riches that were lost in the comparatively recent past. With so many of its monuments, artworks and archives destroyed, we need to look to Messina’s hinterland to find reflections of the city’s artistic culture. Vella’s careful exploration of surviving panels scattered across the provincia di Messina is another major contribution. The author is probably the only person who has faithfully followed in the footsteps of the brothers Saliba from the Veneto to Malta, and to every Sicilian hill-top town that commissioned their work. This book has its origins in Charlene Vella’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Warwick, which I had the privilege to supervise. It is with some pride that I introduce this enriched and expanded version to a wider readership. Presented here on their own terms, the antonelliani emerge from their master’s shadow as one of the most travelled and best documented painting workshops of the Renaissance Mediterranean. Through their example, this study speaks to broader debates on mobility, migration and artistic exchange across and around the Middle Sea in the pre-Modern period. Most of all, it reveals how Antonello’s artistic legacy and his family’s exposure to Venice and its art nurtured a neglected Renaissance of painting in Sicily, Calabria and Malta, one that would ultimately be superseded but which nonetheless possessed its own considerable invention and appeal.