Antonello Da Messina.

 

One of the original note-book by Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, presented at the exhibition of ‘Palazzo Reale’ in Milan, here with the reconstruction which allowed the art critic to attribute with certainty the "San Girolamo nello studio" (1474-1475) to Antonello Da Messina. The enlargement of details from Antonello’s Da Messina works and now being at the exhibition of ‘Palazzo Reale’ in Milan, are by the ‘Centro di Ateneo di Arti visive’ of the ‘Università degli Studi’ of Bergamo.

 

 

 

With the loving gaze of a son who proved himself, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa(1) did care the exhibition now being at ‘Palazzo Reale’, and named after Antonello Da Messina.

We are very interested in following the thinking of this cultured and passionate Curator, as he realized and got that special love that surrounded the master Antonello, not a ‘massive’ love indeed nor shouting but clearly perceptible at his contemporaries – we don’t refer only to Jacobello, Antonello’s son who finished and signed the magnificent "Madonna col Bambino", just sketched by his father, who was dead one year before : " 1480 XIII Mesis Decebris / Jacobus Anto.lli filiu no / humani pictoris me fecit(2)".

 

As a matter of fact, of Antonello Da Messina it can be said that he knew how to move in the real, while he knew thoroughly the reality itself.

 

Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa so introduces in this special exhibition someone who, four centuries after, at the end of '800 acted as a son who cares with passion and patience to reconstruct a hidden heritage which was proving not only to be unvaluable, but also indispensable to understand the novelty of the Renaissance and its future weakness too…

 

It’s about Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, passionate historian and a qualified critic who was able to recover and inventory mostly of the Sicilian painter’s surviving paintings, as survivors to earthquakes and floods or stolen too, or even covered and to someone else falsely attributed (3).  The exhibition places ahead the work of the man – i.e. both of the painter and of the historian-critic – instead the final object which would risk to end into a collector’s bulimia.

 

Several works by Antonello Da Messina were destroyed in the 1693 earthquake in Sicily. Then the 1860 flood wiped away even the Antonello’s humble tomb, at the Friars Minor church "Santa Maria del Gesù" where he himself, surprising his fellowes citizens, called to be buried. And already in life he had aroused astonishment, marrying in 1455 Giovanna Cuminella, widowed with the daughter Caterinella so that he could buy a dowry for her, even financially committing himself.

 

Giorgio Vasari dedicated a biography-romance to Antonello Da Messina in his "Vite" (1550-1568), indicating him as the one who bewitched 'Giovanni Da Brugia', i.e. the excellent Flemish Jan van Eyck from whom Antonello would have received the secret of oil painting. Cavalcaselle so was able to understand that, after staying at van Eyck until he died, Antonello didn’t immediately come back to Messina, from which he had suddenly leaved stopping his good worksop business but, as a matter of fact, he moved to Venice with all his family.

 

And right in his Sicily, governed by Alfonso D’Aragona and the nerve centre of Europe in 1430 both for trade and culture, Antonello knew those excellent technicians works who were the Flemish artists for the Art to come. Suddenly he had decided to go and meet them in person, with the invincible charge of a wise intuition.

 

Around 1860 Cavalcaselle - who previously had been entrusted by a London publisher to carry out field researches for a critical edition of “Le vite” but the job proved too big to handle – received a new assignment from the Ministry of Education to draw up a Catalog of the church-owned works of art in Umbria and Marche : the historian could build a large inventory which deserved him the appellation of Vasari work ‘continuer’.

Really provided of an exceptional visual memory as well as an excellent draftsman, Cavalcaselle suceeded in attribute with certainty to Antonello Da Messina a number of works which seemed vanished or fakes, and as a consequence he literally traveled on foot or by mule for kilometres and kilometres between Museums, private and public Art Galleries and Churches, animated by a sincere passion which still today would excite us.

 

His own notebooks, full of strokes taken from Antonello’s works which he could easily link to those of other authors who met or had been working with the master and become little at a time his own ‘navigator’, allowed Cavalcaselle to reconstruct and at last to locate the routes made by Antonello even out Italy bounds(4), as well as the works carried out over the years but now obscured by the rough of forgery and oblivion.

 

In the path suggested by the exhibition we suddenly face "L'Annunciata"(5), taken up by Antonello at the end of 'meritatio'(6) when Mary, overcome the fear and perplexity of an announcement of which she offers to us only the certain elements – i.e. she herself and the book opened at the page she was reading – she ‘thinks’ possible the real she guess and she receive it.

Maybe the first woman in paintings History, this young Sicilian lady can allow herself to approve her own intuition – or project we don’t know : her innocence and glance with satisfaction don’t let any doubt. Not at all we face an ‘angelic woman’ of the ‘courtly’ tradition(7) and that causes the comparison with “The Virgin reading” (1460) (8) which has a well distinct Flemish flavour even in the melancholic transparence of her face and is light years away from this innovative Madonna.

 

We can wonder what happened in the refined thought of the Sicilian master who, overcoming his own aesthetic talent and technical skill, attributed with unsuspected vigour and already at the end of his career, to a well connoted face and also recognizable maybe, that intelligent and imputative look, even with a nod of veiled satisfaction which he so often portrayed only on virile faces(9).

 

However Antonello’s devoted fidelity dedicates to Christ a completely different register, and to the many interpretations that see him suffering, caught in the sudden temptation of having been abandoned by Father...(10)

 

Perhaps much still remains to be investigated into Antonello Da Messina’s work because he - in the early turbulent Renaissance in which he lived – was already able to wonder if the absurd guilt indeed of which Christ was accused, wasn’t his own fault of kneeling in front of the woman he didn’t knew. (11).

 

 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 30, 2019 

 

 

 

1. Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa (Torino, 1971) is teacher of ‘Storia dell’Arte Moderna e Museologia’ at the Faculty of ‘Scienze Umanistiche’ at the ‘Università degli Studi’ of Bergamo, where he is director of the ‘Centro di Ateneo di Arti Visive’. He is art historian and Art and History consultant at the ‘Direzione dei Musei Civici di Vicenza e Conservatoria dei Pubblici Monumenti’. He cared for the ‘Scuderie del Quirinale’ in Rome the exhibtions : ‘Antonello da Messina’ (2006), ‘Giovanni Bellini’ (2008), ‘Lorenzo Lotto’ (2011), ‘Tintoretto’ (2012), ‘Tiziano’ (2013) e ‘Antonello da Messina, pittore non umano’ a Palermo (2018), now being at Milan until the next June 2. He personally cared exhibitions at Bruxelles, Moscow and Paris. He published for Einaudi ‘Venezia, l’altro Rinascimento’ (PBE Arte, 2014).
2. “1480 del mese di dicembre, Jacobo figlio di Antonello, pittore non umano mi fece”, is the autograph reported down on the right on the label of ‘Madonna col Bambino’ at the ‘Accademia Carrara’ of Bergamo.
3. Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, Italian historian and critic, participated in the Revolution of 1848 and for that he was condemned to death by the Austrians, he run away from ‘Lombardo-Veneto Realm’ to Rome where he fighted under the leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini. After the fall of the ‘Repubblica Romana’, he took refuge in England, working as an excellent draftman and restorer in the ‘Select Committee’ of the National Gallery in London. He expressed doubts on the traditional attribution, he imputed without hesitation the work ‘San Girolamo nello studio’ to Antonello da Messina and between 1857 and 1861 he came back to Italy where the political situation had become favourable again.
4. In 1476, called by Leonardo Da Vinci to the Court of Galeazzo Sforza, enlightened but intemperant Duke of Milan, Antonello Da Messina preferred to remain in Venice where he already was working : a few months after, when in December of the same year Galeazzo was killed due to a conspiracy of noble men with consequent dramatic turmoils in the town, Antonello came back directly to Sicily.
5. The work (1475-1476) is permanently located at ‘Palazzo Abatellis’ in Palermo.
6. ‘Meritatio’ is the fourth moment, ending the ‘L’Annunciazione’ and preceeded by : ‘conturbatio’, ‘interrogatio’, humiliatio’.
7. ‘Court woman’, or ‘Court lady’ from  Latin ‘domina’. She’s the woman sung in the romances of ‘courtly love’ in France, from where it spread starting from the XII century as a reaction to the social rigidity of customs : she’s the woman whose beauty blinds the man who submits to her without any reward, an ecstasies indeed.
8. Dated 1460 and attributed to Antonello da Messina, ‘The Virgin reading’ is in Milan, at the ‘Museo Poldi Pezzoli’.
9. First of all I think of the ‘Portrait of a young man’ (1473-1474), London – The National Gallery; but also of the ‘Portrait of a man - Trivulzio Portrait’, (1476) Turin – ‘Palazzo Madama’, ‘Museo Civico d’Arte Antica’.
10. ‘Ecce homo’ (1475), Piacenza – ‘Collegio Alberoni’; ‘Ecce homo’ (1468-1470), Genoa – ‘Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola’; ‘Cristo alla colonna’ (1478) Paris, ‘Musèe du Louvre’.
11. Thanks to prof. Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa at whom I could listen in the introduction of last April the 11th, at the ‘Sant’Andrea Apostolo’ church at Bergamo Alta, on invitation received by the parish Don Giovanni Gusmini. And afterwards I’ve listened him in Milan, during his own introduction at ‘Palazzo Reale’ lasto May the 4th.