In the Footsteps of Antonello da Messina

By Charlene Vella

Published by Midsea Books, 2022

Differently from most ‘cultural’ volumes published in Malta (including my own), this is not quite a Melitensia book. Or rather, it is also, marginally, a book in which Malta figures, but its horizons span a far wider Europe, and the author successfully breaks all provincial, not to say parochial, barriers.

The painter Antonello da Messina (c. 1430–1479), like many other geniuses, left a durable artistic heritage, a ‘school’.

Rather particular to Antonello is the fact that his ‘school’, the Antonelliani, consisted almost exclusively of those who carried his DNA – sons, nephews, cousins. By design or coincidence, he managed to keep it all in the family. Together, they imprinted a lasting mark on the religious iconography of Sicily, Southern Italy, Venice and Malta.

Antonio de Saliba, 'Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist', Nebraska, USA.

Antonello has long been the focus of extended study by art historians who quite early realised his colossal stature in the creative world. Literature about him abounds. Not so his school.

I believe Charlene Vella’s to be the very first major and systematic exploration of the vast oeuvre by his followers. I generally shy away from disagreeing with Mario Buhagiar, but I find it problematic to endorse his judgement that the work of the Antonelliani “does not cross the barriers of great art”.

Undoubtedly, it does not compete with Antonello’s masterpieces of inspiration and painting technique, but it still has traction, personality and consequence. They cannot be dismissed as just shabby, sterile Madonnari.

For Malta, the Antonelliani represent the first break with a pervasive and sullen parochial mediocrity. Before the Order of St John nudged Malta towards international high art, the main aesthetic glimmers came from the Franciscan Observants of Rabat who commissioned the Sicilian Gaginis and the Antonelliani to brighten up Malta’s artistic greylisting.

Antonio de Saliba, 'Madonna and Child', Catanzaro, Calabria.

If only for being at the forefront of an aesthetic awakening of the nation, these painters deserved to be studied. I believe my father Vincenzo to have been the first to resurrect them and place them in their proper light in the 1949 exhibition and his pioneering catalogue The Madonna in Art, quoted in Vella’s text but not included in her breathtaking bibliography.

Admittedly, there is a quantum leap between those early sketches and the present encyclopaedic compilation. Although Antonello and his school asserted a very personal and distinctive profile, they actually represent a felicitous blend of diverse cultural influences: Gothic, Byzantine, Burgundian, Renaissance, all come together to lose their individuality and morph into the unique Antonello.

To this, his younger relatives added a bonus – the influence of Giovanni Bellini. Messina then housed one of the major hubs of commercial and intellectual activity in the Mediterranean.

Charlene Vella

Vella’s academic work, her perseverance, her attention to detail, her thoroughness prove nothing short of amazing. She subjected the archives and the pictures themselves to third-degree interrogation. I don’t believe she has left much for future researchers to chew upon.

Vella’s academic work, her perseverance, her attention to detail, her thoroughness prove nothing short of amazing

Documentary exploration was tragically hampered by the virtual obliteration of rich Messina archives, collateral damage of the terrible 1908 earthquake. Thankfully, scholars had already scoured and transcribed some of them before calamity struck. In a perverse sort of way, a blessing, as this provided an incentive to explore the Maltese archives – which proved unstingy with references to the Antonelliani, all copied verbatim in this volume. Vella can also claim to have added a number of new works to the known oeuvre.

Archival losses were not the only calamities that ravaged the Antonello memory. To give one example: for the Franciscan church of Rabat, Antonio painted c. 1510–1515 an impressive polyptych consisting of no less than 15 panels.

Over the years, philistines dismembered and dispersed (or destroyed) this extraordinary composite and today only two panels remain in place and just another five are known to survive. What happened to the other eight?

Antonio de Saliba, Goldfinch in the central panel of the Rabat polyptych, c.1505–1510.

The author has managed to trace, photograph and record a large number of paintings by Antonello’s relatives: Antonio, Pietro, Jacobello, Salvo – more than 90 paintings in all, now scattered throughout museums, public buildings, churches and private collections the world over. One peculiarity. Differently from the great Antonello, his family seem to have painted religious art exclusively. Antonello also excelled as a consummate portrait painter – for some idiosyncratic reason, all the sitters in his known portraits look right – why?

The Church then assumed the role of the great patron of the arts, believing as it did that all the senses should lead to God. That probably explains the massive and enduring success of Catholic ritual over other less choreographed creeds – mystic ceremonial penetrated every aspect of physicality.

Its liturgy captured simultaneously all the five senses – music and chanting for the ears; incense and flowers, the smell; Eucharist communion, the taste; physical penance and rosary saying, the touch; and finally, for the eyes, the splendours of art – a cumulative hypnotic takeover. Religious art as figurative representation yes, but mostly art for its emblematic content.

The Antonelliani prove as skilled as anyone else at conveying the message of redemption through shapes, colours and their symbolic associations. Their colour-coding does not, however, always result clear. They clothe their many Madonnas invariably in blue and red. If the smaller under-dress is blue, the large mantle is red, and vice-versa, so that in virtually all their Madonnas, either a red, or a blue, statement predominates and overwhelms the viewer. 

Pietro de Saliba, 'Madonna adoring the Child', Venice. Note the predominance of the blue mantle.

Putting aside petty local red and blue politics, should we read a meaning in this? Or was it just a penny-pinching measure? Blue pigment, being derived from precious powdered lapis lazuli imported all the way from Afghanistan, cost a fortune and so patrons on a budget would opt for the cheaper red.

But some symbolism equally pervades the iconography of the Antonelliani, like the obvious attributes of holy images e.g., palm fronds identify martyrs. Take the Madonna and Child of the Franciscan Observants in Rabat.

A crown tops the composition, signifying sovereignty, majesty; mother and child both hold the same sprig, probably of acacia or broom, meaning immortality or humility.

And on the side, there is a wondrously depicted goldfinch, symbol of joy, found in several Renaissance altarpieces by Lorenzetti, Raphael, Crivelli and others. Antonio painted the Rabat goldfinch so realistically that I am amazed it has resisted the loving attentions of our refined hunter-conservationists all these years.