Antonello da Messina

Antonello da Messina
Portrait of Man, possibly a self-portrait.
Born	Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio c. 1430 Messina, Italy
Died	February 1479 Messina, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Known for	Painting
Movement	Italian Renaissance

Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio, but also called Antonello degli Antoni and Anglicized as Anthony of Messina (c. 1430 – February 1479), was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Italian Renaissance. His work shows strong influences from Early Netherlandish painting although there is no documentary evidence that he ever travelled beyond Italy.Giorgio Vasari credited him with the introduction of oil painting into Italy. Unusually for a south Italian artist of the Renaissance, his work proved influential on painters in northern Italy, especially in Venice.

Antonello was born at Messina around 1429–1431, to Giovanni de Antonio Mazonus and Garita (Margherita).

According to a letter written in 1524 by the Neapolitan humanist Pietro Summonte, in about 1450 he was a pupil of the painter Niccolò Colantonio at Naples, where Netherlandish painting was then fashionable. This account of his training is accepted by most art historians.

Antonello returned to Messina from Naples during the 1450s. In around 1455 he painted the so-called Sibiu Crucifixion, inspired by Flemish treatments of the subject, which is now in the Muzeul de Artǎ in Bucharest. A Crucifixion in the Royal Museum of Antwerp dates from the same period. These early works shows a marked Flemish influence, which is now understood to be inspired by his master Colantonio and from paintings by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck that belonged to Colantonio's patron, Alfonso V of Aragon.

In his biography of the artist, Giorgio Vasari remarked that Antonello saw an oil painting by Jan Van Eyck (the Lomellini Tryptych) belonging to King Alfonso V of Aragon at Naples. Another theory, supported only by vague documentary evidence, suggests that in 1456 Antonello visited Milan, where he might have met Van Eyck's most accomplished follower, Petrus Christus. Since Antonello was one of the first Italians to master Eyckian oil painting, and Christus was the first Netherlandish painter to learn Italian linear perspective, such a meeting would be a convenient explanation for the evolution of the styles of both artists. However, neither is known for certain to have been in Milan at the time.