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1 - ANTONELLO da MESSINA (Messina circa 1430 - 1479) Face of a y…
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Estimate €1,000,000 - €2,000,000
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Description
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. He presented it to Michel Laclotte, who was the first to suggest that it should be attributed to Antonello da Messina. Antonello da Messina is a myth in Western art. Just like Leonardo da Vinci or Vermeer. He is known for a very small number of powerful and famous images. Only around forty of his paintings have survived, including fifteen iconic portraits and twenty-five religious subjects1. In other words, every new addition to his corpus is an essential contribution. Ever since Vasari's Vite, he has been credited with introducing the oil medium to the Peninsula, and building a bridge between the realist tradition of Van Eyck and Petrus Christus in Flanders and the early Italian Renaissance. The artist combined a Dutch sense of description with an Italian concern for psychological immediacy, humanising a sacred subject in a direct and intimate way that invites the viewer to identify emotionally. Antonello's intelligence in assimilating diverse influences, his mastery of Nordic technique, his Florentine spatiality, the soft light of Piero della Francesca, and his dialogue with Giovanni Bellini during his Venetian sojourn - all combine to 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 These characteristics are present in our unpublished panel, as is the artist's tendency to idealise the shape of a face into an ovoid geometric volume. The frontal aspect of the figure, sometimes enhanced by a very slight rotation that highlights the face and its features, is another typical aspect found in several of his paintings2. The oil technique enabled him to spread the colour in successive transparent layers, achieving effects of precision, softness and brilliance that were impossible with tempera. The gold background and the shape of the nimbus are comparable to some of his works still preserved in Sicily, in particular 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 altarpiece of San Cassiano (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), where the faces almost overlap. The way in which the gaze is constructed is identical. The rare colours, such as that of Saint Lucy's dress, can be compared to the green tone of the velvet on the collar, and underneath we can see the beginnings of the brown and gold brocade that also appears on the Madonna in the Viennese painting. Our figure shares the same sculptural aspect as the Saint Sebastian in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden (1478), with the sunken eyebrow arch, hollowed out by the shadow, highlighting the eyeball in relief, the design of the bridge of the nose extended to the eyebrows, and the rounded chin, all part of the same quest to idealise and individualise the model. In the absence of a precise iconographic attribute, it is difficult to identify our figure. It is certainly a religious figure, but one who did not hold the office of bishop. It could be a deacon. The opening in the robe at the neck would seem to indicate a white dalmatic and a brown robe underneath. The tonsure of the hair might 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 contains a more specific allusion, such as the star that often accompanies him above the nimbus. We could also mention Saint Lorenzo, deacon of Sixtus. II and died young, as depicted by Giovanni Bellini in two altarpieces (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia and Pesaro, Civic Museum). Professor Mauro Lucco suggests that our painting was the central panel of a gonfalone. We know that on his return to Sicily, Antonello made several of these for Catania's churches: Santa Barbara, San Luca and Santa Maria della Misericordia3. We should also mention the archive dated 6 March 1480, in which his son Jacobello undertook to four friars from the church of the Disciplinanti of San Michele in Catania to complete a gonfalone left unfinished by his father on his death, which was to include a painted panel with several figures. The whole piece was probably set in a richly sculpted and plastered frame, to be sent to Messina before the following August, to be gilded and painted. While the term "gonfalone" today conjures up images of a cloth banner, generally intended to be carried in procession, in 15th-century Sicily it was more commonly used to describe a wooden object consisting of a painted section, usually small, and an imposing, richly openwork and gilded frame atop a staff. These carved wooden banners can be seen in the Palazzo Abatellis, the National Gallery in Palermo (gonfalone de Tusa) and the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Galladoro in the province of Messina. In contrast to an unchanging tradition that imposed the image of the Virgin and Child for the "gonfalone", Antonello had innovated in Catania with other figures such as Saint Barnabas, Saint Luke or the Virgin of Mercy, as well as other unspecified subjects. The gonfalones were large carved and gilded wooden structures decorated with icons or works of art by the best local artists (up to 1 m high and 1 m wide). Each brotherhood had its own gonfalone, a symbol of prestige. Gonfalones were generally two-sided, with representations of the patron saint and a religious scene (see A. Cutrera, "Gonfaloni processionali della Sicilia e il Gonfalone di Forza d'Agro", in Bolletino d'Arte, 1925, pp. 216-224). A word about the type of wood used for the panel: fir is more rarely used in Italy than poplar. Probably from the mountains of southern Tyrol, fir is sometimes used as a support in Venice, as Vasari noted, particularly in the circle of Giovanni Bellini (The Lives, 1568, ed. Milanesi, III, p. 152). This support would be well suited, for example, to a processional standard, thanks to its lighter weight. We would like to thank Mauro Lucco for confirming the attribution of the painting after a visual examination in September 2025, and for his help in writing this note. He suggests dating our painting to the artist's return to Sicily, a slightly earlier period than the Dresden Saint Sebastian, i.e. 1476-1477. We quote him in French: "We have documents attesting to this period concerning works, or rather gonfalons, left unfinished at Antonello's death and completed by his son Jacobello. What's more, perfect frontality is a position in polyptychs reserved for the divine, i.e. God or the Virgin: the saints generally face the centre, the peaks of heaven, and are therefore always turned slightly to the right or left, whereas ours is, so to speak, in a 'not his' position, which is permitted in gonfalons but not generally in polyptychs". We would like to thank Professor Mauro Natale for confirming the attribution of the painting after a visual examination in May 2026 and for sharing his opinion with us. He proposes that our painting was part of a large altarpiece, painted before his stay in Venice, around 1473. He likens it to the Saint Benedict, a large panel of the altarpiece painted in Messina, which belongs to the Lombardy Region and has been deposited at the Uffizi, together with the other two elements of the same altarpiece (see M. Lucco, Antonello da Messina, Paris, 2011, reproduced in colour on plate 37). A condition report is available on request.
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About the sale Antique paintings - Decorative Arts
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Auction time 06/16/2026 at 2:30 PM
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