Word: antonello
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great painter to boast of, but in the five centuries since his death he had never been paid the tribute of a big, retrospective show. Last week the city of Messina (pop. 220,790) was finally making belated amends, with the first major exhibition honoring its home town master, Antonello da Messina. It was a limited display, for Antonello's known works are few. But the show did include 15 religious paintings and portraits known to be from Antonello's own hand, plus ten more pictures hopefully attributed to him, and 100 by his Sicilian contemporaries and followers...
...historians once maintained that Antonello traveled to Bruges to discover the oil painting technique developed by Jan van Eyck. More likely he learned it in Naples, from a copyist of Flemish paintings. For a year (1475-76) he taught the technique in Venice, where even the great Giovanni Bellini was eager to learn from him. What Antonello brought to Bellini (and through him, to Titian, Giorgione and Italian art in general) was nothing less than a new tool for rendering light. Having accomplished that, he returned to Messina...
...Before Antonello, the great Italian painters had worked with tempera, i.e., opaque water color. Mixed with egg white and applied to mirror-smooth panels with the points of tiny brushes, tempera has a brilliance and precision that oils can never match. But oils are far more fluent. They can be laid atop one another in transparent glazes to produce a glowing vibrancy akin to that of colors in nature. They can be blurred into shadow, and they can be broadly, loosely, quickly or gently brushed, in imitation of the flooding sparkle of light itself. Antonello preached this technique by example...