Antonello da Messina’s nephews in Bellini’s Bottega and beyond

Charlene Vella is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta, and has obtained her PhD from the University of Warwick. Her PhD research was carried out under the tutelage of Dr Donal Cooper, and researched the followers of Antonello da Messina and their work in Venice, Sicily, Malta and beyond.

 

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Sponsored by the Alfred Mizzi Foundation. In 1461, one of Antonello da Messina’s (c.1430-79) sisters married the intagliatore Giovanni de Saliba, whose son Antonio would become one of Eastern Sicily’s most prolific painters in the first decades of the 16th century. Antonio presumably grew up watching his uncle execute innovative Early Renaissance paintings in their native Messina, and travel to Venice for important commissions between 1475 and 1476. Unfortunately for him, Antonello died in February 1479 and he could not be apprenticed to him. It is known that the 13- or 14-year-old Antonio was instead apprenticed for four years to Antonello’s son, Jacobello, who is only documented in Messina between 1479 and 1480, and who may have headed the Venetian branch of Antonello’s workshop after 1476. Antonio’s apprenticeship agreement dated 21 January 1480 bound Antonio to ‘debeat ipsum magistrum suum sequi in quocumque loco accesserit’, that is, follow his master wherever he went. Antonio’s signed paintings in Venice prove that he followed Jacobello to Venice where he widened his artistic horizons before returning to Messina in the mid-1490s. In the absence of documentary evidence, Antonio’s signed paintings suggest that he was in fact in Venice and that he was also attached to Giovanni Bellini’s large workshop for an unknown period of time. On Antonio’s return to Messina, now destroyed yet partly published documentary evidence, and surviving paintings from several towns in Eastern Sicily, Calabria and Malta, suggest his popularity following his return. Lack of documentary evidence is a result of the catastrophic 1908 earthquake and maremoto that struck Messina, destroying much of its archives and works of art. Enough survives in nearby towns in order to be able to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the artist’s oeuvre and the tastes of patrons in Eastern Sicily, Calabria and Malta. His Venetian experience and relation to Antonello must have elevated his popularity among the provincial patrons in these southernmost regions in the central Mediterranean who, however, required him to produce anachronistic yet desirable wooden gonfaloni, painted crucifixes, and elaborate polyptychs until the end of his career in the mid-1530s. The paper will show how Antonio de Saliba tried to reconcile his patrons’ demands with his experience of late 15th-century Venetian Renaissance art.

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