The Virgin Annunciate by Antonello da Messina
By STAN PARCHIN
June 27, 2010
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| Antonello da Messina (Italian, ca. 1430-1479). The Virgin Annunciate (ca. 1475-76). Oil on panel. 45 x 34.5 cm. Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, Palermo. |
Scarce documentation exists for a reliable biography of Antonello da Messina (ca. 1430-1479). His life and career remain shrouded in legend, misinformation and speculation. The talented Sicilian artist is known for having combined the achievements of Italian and Northern Renaissance painting in his insightful portraits and religious compositions, among them The Virgin Annunciate (ca. 1475-76).
Antonello da Messina and Renaissance Italy
During the brief reign of René d'Anjou (r. 1438-42), Naples was at the cultural crossroads of French, Provençal, Spanish and Netherlandish artistic influences. Sometime between 1445 and 1455, Antonello, from the seaport of Messina, worked in Naples under Niccolo Colantonio, a master of Northern European oil painting techniques. The head of a thriving workshop by 1457, he perhaps first traveled to Rome in 1460. There Antonello presumably saw works by Fra Angelico (ca. 1390/95-1455) and Piero della Francesca (ca. 1420/22-1492). The painter journeyed to Venice in 1475-76, where he executed the main altarpiece for the church of San Cassiano. Records beginning in 1456 indicate that Antonello spent most of his life in Sicily, where he trained his son Jacobello and his brother Giordano.
The Virgin Annunciate
A masterpiece of Italian Renaissance art, Antonello's The Virgin Annunciate was created for a domestic interior. It is a haunting image of the adolescent Mary when the angel Gabriel announces to her that she will bear God's Son. The modest Sicilian female, attired in a simple blue mantle, is aloof and mysterious. She is shown bust-length and against a plain background. Mary looks up from behind a reading desk upon which her book of devotions rests. Her direct outward gaze and right hand raised in a blessing gesture engage the viewer, who replaces Gabriel as the provider of the miraculous news and becomes an active participant in the charming painting's story. The lack of a pendant or adjoining panel suggests that the angel's presence is implied.
Noteworthy in The Virgin Annunciate is Antonello's use of light to build convincing forms. To paint Mary's foreshortened right hand, he may have employed a velo, a stringed grid through which an artist observed objects and then recorded their contours onto a squared piece of paper.
Sources
Barbera, Gioacchino, Keith Christiansen and Andrea Bayer. Antonello da Messina: Sicily's Renaissance Master (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005, 12-30, 46-47.
Beck, James. Italian Renaissance Painting. Köln: Könemann, 1999, 280-285.