ANTONELLO da MESSINA (Messina circa 1430 - 1479) - Lot 1

ANTONELLO da MESSINA (Messina circa 1430 - 1479) Face of a young saint Fir panel, one board, not parqueted 30 x 21.5 cm Thickness: 2.9 cm Old restorations Provenance : Most likely collection of Count Auguste de Forbin (1777 - 1841), painter, pupil of David, director of the Louvre Museum (1816-1841); his château in La Barben (Bouches-du-Rhône) ; Acquired on the art market in Marseille by the current owner in the late 1980s. Presented by the latter to Michel Laclotte, who was the first to suggest that it should be attributed to Antonello de Messina. Antonello da Messina is a myth in Western art. Just like Leonardo da Vinci or Vermeer. He is known for a very limited number of powerful and famous images. Only around forty of his paintings have survived, including fifteen iconic portraits and twenty-five religious subjects. In other words, every new addition to his corpus is an essential contribution. Since Vasari's Vite, he has been credited with introducing the oil medium to the Peninsula, and bridging the gap between the realist tradition of Van Eyck and Petrus Christus in Flanders and the early Italian Renaissance. The artist combines a Dutch sense of description with an Italian concern for psychological immediacy, humanizing a sacred subject through a direct, intimate mode that invites the viewer to identify emotionally. Antonello's intelligence in assimilating diverse influences - the mastery of Nordic technique, Florentine spatiality, the soft light of Piero della Francesca, his dialogue with Giovanni Bellini during his Venetian sojourn - make his synthesis the quintessence of Quattrocento art, just before Leonardo da Vinci pushed his discoveries even further. These characteristics are present in our unpublished panel, as is the artist's tendency to idealize the shape of a face into an ovoid geometric volume. The frontal aspect of the figure, sometimes enriched by a very slight rotation highlighting the face and its particularities, is another typical aspect found in many of his paintings. The oil technique enables him to spread color in successive transparent layers, achieving effects of precision, softness and brilliance that are impossible with tempera. The gold background and the shape of the nimbus are comparable to some of his works still preserved in Sicily, notably the infant Jesus from the polyptych of Saint Gregory (Messina Regional Museum, c. 1472-1475). Our saint shares many elements with his universally acclaimed masterpieces painted during his stay in Venice, The Condottiere (Musée du Louvre) and above all the San Cassiano Altarpiece (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), where the faces almost overlap. The way in which the gaze is constructed is identical. Rare colors such as that of St. Lucy's dress can be compared to the green tone of the velvet collar, and underneath is the beginning of a brown and gold brocade that also appears on the Madonna in the Viennese painting. Our figure shares with the Saint Sebastian in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (1478), the same sculptural aspect, with the sunken arch of the eyebrows, hollowed out by the shadow, bringing out the eyeball in relief, the design of the nasal bridge extended to the eyebrows, the rounded chin, participating in the same quest for idealization and individualization of the model. Iconography and dating In the absence of a precise iconographic attribute, it is difficult to identify our figure. He is certainly a cleric, but not a bishop. It could be a deacon. The opening in the robe at neck level would seem to indicate a white dalmatic and a brown robe underneath. The tonsure of the hair could suggest the Dominican order, although their habit is still black and white today. Dominic de Guzmán could have been a possible candidate, but his iconography includes a more specific allusion, such as the star that often accompanies him, above the nimbus. We could also consider St. Lorenzo, deacon of Sixtus. II and died young, as depicted by Giovanni Bellini in two altarpieces (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia and Pesaro, Civic Museum). [...] WE INVITE YOU TO CONSULT THE FULL DESCRIPTION IN THE PDF CATALOG.