Antonello da Messina, between North and South
One of several of Antonello's paintings titled Portrait of a Man. Likely a self portrait.
Antonello da Messina, of Messina, a harbor city in the northwest of Sicily, was one of the few Southern Italian painters to truly influence the wider, Northern Italy-centric Renaissance (Barbera 7).
He used oil paint, which is important because it allowed the painter to add many layers and easily rework minute details while also lending the painting a luminous quality.
He is widely said to have met Jan van Eyck, the Flemish painter whose influence upon Messina is clear, although this is a chronological impossibility - van Eyck died when Antonello was eleven, and Antonello did not travel beyond Italy before adulthood (Christiansen n.p.). Antonello is also thought to have traveled to different European port cities, this idea proffered as explanation of his eclectic style, though this is an assumption based on few primary sources (Barbera 51)!
A historical certainty is Antonello’s role as uniter of styles between the Italian and the Netherlandish. From his island home on the periphery of Europe, Antonello became one of the most uniquely skilled portrait artists in Europe. He possessed the classical command of anatomy and attention to color, light, and shadow characteristic of the wider Italian Renaissance moment. His deep understanding of the geometry of physical bodies allowed him to create base structures of beings and cast light upon them with his brush to create depth. He employed these skills in the creation of portraits which seemed photographic, which seemed only a breath away from life (Barbera 7). His portraits incorporated, in varying degrees, qualities of Netherlandish art. Though Antonello could not have met Jan van Eyck, the Flemish painter was a sure influence upon him, along with Petrus Christus (Christiansen n.p.). This is evident in Antonello’s fairly un-Italian attention to detail beyond the anatomical, as regards defining physical rooms and “props” like the book in The Virgin Annunciate.
The Virgin Annunciate has both the Southern attention to facial geometry and light and the Northern attention to narrative detail like the book in front of the Virgin and the expression across her face. This is a portrait, interestingly intended not to be timeless (as is typical of the Southern Renaissance), but rather specific to a certain emotional moment.