Antonello da Messina: l’ opera completa

Abstract

Antonello da Messina’s Annunciation with the Blessèd Virgin sola breaks with iconic convention, so inviting new interpretations of the theme. The Rome exhibition of 2006 allowed one to compare Antonello with van Eyck: Antonello seemed pre-modern. This review discusses three important essays on the Annunciation (see the last three keywords). All three perceptive essays raise theological and phenomenological issues directly related to the almost unique iconic representation which Antonello gives us.

Appendix

Antonello and the Theme of the Annunciation

Marco Collareta

The Annunciation originally in the Annunziata church in Palazzolo Acreide, and now in the Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo in Siracusa (Fig. 1, cat. 28)¹² is the only surviving work by Antonello that can be conclusively linked with the document that records its commission. For some time, scholars have been in agreement that the painting may be connected with a contract drawn up on 23 August 1474, in which Antonello pledged to hand over to the client, Giuliano Maiuni of Palazzolo, before the middle of the following November “one painting measuring seven palms, well and diligently painted and gilt, with the image of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, of the Angel Gabriel and of God the Father, and with an encasement appropriate to the painting, as well as a predella painted with foliage and coats of arms of the height of half a palm”¹³. The measurements match with those of the painting, and the word “quatrum”, which appears frequently in the document, has a sense somewhere in between its original meaning, namely a square surface, and its later, Italian meaning, namely a painting, ‘quadro’ (Folena 1983, pp. 832–836).

However, if we compare carefully the client’s written requests with what we can see today, we notice some remarkable differences. The foliage and the coats of arms that were meant to adorn the “scannello”, i.e., the predella, have obviously gone missing along with the latter. As for the figure of God the Father, the wording in the contract makes it unlikely that it was ever painted by Antonello in a now lost top panel. It is far more likely that Antonello, after careful consideration, decided not to include it. Of course, we can only guess about this decision; however, it appears likely that Antonello took an active approach to his sacred subject.

Catholic doctrine teaches that the Incarnation of the Word, which occurs at the same time as the Annunciation, is the work of the whole Trinity, and in particular of the Holy Spirit, which operates mysteriously in the body of the Virgin Mary (Müller 1990, p. 342.). This is stated with great clarity in the third line of the so-called Apostle’s Creed: “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”¹⁴. In accord with these words, Antonello leaves God the Father in an inscrutable heavenly elsewhere, and has the Holy Spirit appear in front of our eyes in the familiar symbolic form of a dove. We see the mystical bird in the head of a ray of light that passes through the window pane, as a direct allegory of Mary’s perpetual virginity (Meiss 1960), just as it approaches the right ear of the girl from Nazareth, who is kneeling at her prie-dieu. Medieval theologians were partial to the hypothesis of a conception “through the ear” (“per aurem”) in a case as exceptional as that of the Incarnation of the Word (Guldan 1968), since the only Biblical account of the Annunciation, by St. Luke, presents this mystery as a brief dialogue between the angel, sent by God, and the Virgin, who is deeply stirred and accepts.

From this perspective, Mary and Gabriel are really the drama’s main actors: in Antonello’s painting, they face each other almost symmetrically, their heads slightly turned so that the onlooker may better hear the words that they are uttering. However, while the three-quarter view of Gabriel’s face, which is further trimmed down by the shading on his left cheek, is close to a profile, Mary’s face is seen almost frontally: and it is fully bathed by the light from the left. She is responding to the angel who has just stopped speaking: she is assenting to the taking place of the most important event in history. To take place: the contract insists on a “casamento condicencium”. The client was probably alluding to the name of his home town, for which he had destined the painting—Palazzolo Acreide¹⁵. Antonello drew upon all his culture, to combine a setting based on the Flemish taste for the dialectic between internal and external space, with a quintessentially Italian proscenium, with its deliberately “all’antica” marble architecture. Piero della Francesca’s column merges with the vase of Petrus Christus and other so-called “Ponentini”, to mark a clear boundary between the space of the representation and the space of the spectator.

Conceived by Antonello in these terms, the Annunciation in the Galleria Regionale in Siracusa can be described as an “historia” in Alberti’s sense: that is as a given action represented in a unitary space according to the laws of perspective. In a work completed a year earlier, the polyptych of St. Gregory in the Museo Regionale in Messina¹⁶ (Fig. 2; cat. 25), Antonello recounts the same Biblical episode by means of two half-figures painted on two separate panels, and united by the reciprocal nature of their gestures, and by a clear continuity of light and space. The displacement of the protagonists of the Annunciation at the opposite extremes of a structural unit has a long history in both portable and monumental Christian art. In this case, the idea perhaps derives directly from Giovanni Bellini’s slightly earlier polyptych of St. Vincent Ferrer (Tempestini 1992, pp. 38–49) (Fig. 5), which presents a similar structure, like a triumphal arch. Be that as it may, a comparison of the two works brings to the fore some remarkable differences. While Giovanni Bellini, with his angel seen in perfect profile and the Virgin in a three-quarter pose, lays the scene open in front of us, like a book, Antonello literally captures us in the magic net of his art, drawing us in as active elements of the representation. Not only are Antonello’s figures depicted from below, just as they would look if they were up there in the flesh, but he gives both the angel’s profile and the Virgin’s three-quarter view a slight tilt, sufficient to make us feel that the Virgin is seen from the front and the angel is seen from behind. The relevant comparison here is with Francesco del Cossa’s extraordinary Annunciation in Dresden (Fig. 6), where even the architectural setting draws the onlooker into the picture, while the task of marking the boundary between real and painted space falls to the snail, unaware, crawling in the foreground, as a living metaphor of Mary’s perpetual virginity¹⁷.

The fundamental asymmetry that Antonello introduces in St. Gregory’s polyptych, between the two symmetrical compartments with the angel and the Virgin, is something essential for our understanding of his more famous Annunciate. The iconographic type had been in existence for a while, and Antonello himself had perhaps used it in early works, variously attributed to him by scholars¹⁸. What appears as radically new in the Annunciata in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich¹⁹ (Fig. 3, cat. 41) is the general conception of the theme: the half-figure of the Virgin, who is represented alone, is placed directly in front of the onlooker, to whom she is intimately connected by means of her posture and facial expression. In this way, the angel, who in the earlier painting merely introduced the onlooker to the Virgin, is finally ousted by the onlooker who takes over his place. Narrative coherence no longer requires the angel’s presence, since whoever stands in front of the painting is enabled, perfectly, to act his part.

The Annunciata in Munich has been compared, because of her attitude, to a late Byzantine icon by the same title preserved at Fermo (Fig. 7), and because of the rather incongruous idea of making the Virgin appear behind a parapet, to an engraving by the German Master ES dated 1467²⁰ (Fig. 8). Valuable as these comparisons are, they are not sufficient to solve the mystery of this unique painting. We must return to the polyptych of St. Gregory: Antonello places his signature at the bottom of the central panel, which represents the Madonna with Child, not as usual, in the middle, but moved over towards the panel depicting St. Gregory (the principal champion of the legitimacy of the use of sacred images) and in close visual association with a large rosary crown. “Ave Maria gratia plena...”: the prayer recited 50 or 150 times with the aid of this humble prop of Marian devotion directly recalls the “salutatio angelica”, that is, the words that St. Luke has Gabriel pronounce when he appears to the Virgin. Antonello’s contemporaries were keenly aware of this fact. The Dominican monk Michel de Lille, in his “quodlibet, or treatise on the fraternity of the rosary”²¹, written in Cologne between 1476 and 1479, claimed that the Hail Mary “exceeds the other prayers in usefulness, since this greeting generated the son of God, regenerated the world, despoliated Hell, rendered honor to Heaven and came to give all good, and he who recites it devoutly occupies the place of the Angel Gabriel, and as in a special way, generates again the son of God in it, or at least in himself through the help of the glorious virgin Mary who is greeted”²².

These words provide the clearest cultural framework not only for the Munich Annunciata but also (and, one would be tempted to say, especially) for the one in the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia in Palermo²³ (Fig. 4, cat. 35). Painted in the same years in which Michel de Lille was writing his “quodlibet, or treatise”, this sublime painting takes to its logical conclusion the revolution started some time before in the Munich picture. Mary’s gesture and even her mental attitude open up to the external world and involve the spectator more; the single open book on her lectern, renouncing the symbolic counterpoint with the closed book, performs a more strictly narrative function. It is notable that the incongruous parapet that ran parallel to the pictorial plane is removed, and the prie-dieu stands as the only logical element of separation between the Virgin and the angel-onlooker-orant, who is invited to stretch out his/her hand like Mary, if only to gauge with his/her touch (“sensus certior”) the perfectly smooth surface and the perfectly cut corner of an elegant piece of furniture. There is no barrier between the real and the pictorial space, but a perfect continuity between the world of bodily senses and the world of inner experience, the like of which is virtually impossible to find, even in the most inspired devotional books of the late Middle Ages, including the charming Meditationes vitae Christi.

This depends on factors specific to visual, as radically “other” than verbal language. In this respect, the fact that the subject is the Annunciation, and therefore the Incarnation of the Word, is of primary importance. This fundamental dogma is the basis of the theological defense of and the consequent acceptance of sacred images within a religion such as Christianity, derived from Jewish aniconism. The classical argument goes back to St. John Damascene and runs roughly as follows²⁴: The Old Testament is right in banning images, because Yahweh had never renounced being exclusively God. However, after “the Word became flesh”, that ban is no longer warranted; indeed, to deny that Christ can be represented is in fact tantamount to denying that He made Himself man, and would be consequently to commit the sin of docetism. Painters and artists in general therefore have an important role as witnesses of the Incarnation. This role is performed in its purest form by artists who represent the Biblical episode in which the Incarnation actually manifests itself—the Annunciation as recounted by St. Luke.

There is reason to believe that Late Medieval and Early Modern artists, in particular painters, were well aware of such an important responsibility. In this period, St. Luke is not only the author of the third Gospel and of the Acts, but was regarded also a painter himself, and the patron saint of painters²⁵. As for the Annunciation, its pictorial representation enjoys a privileged relationship with the key theme of self-portraiture, both in the very early case of Cola Petruccioli, and in the late case of Pinturicchio²⁶. The only painting by Antonello that has been deemed a self-portrait²⁷ is not relevant in this respect. All the same, the Sicilian painter would have certainly used the technical term “incarnato”, which belongs to the oldest layer of the Italian pictorial vocabulary. The word literally refers to the color of the skin of human figures and faces. However, an implicit connection of this word with theological terminology is suggested in what seems to be its oldest attestation. In a treatise written around the year 1300, the Franciscan mystic Ugo Panziera states: “In the first moment when the mind starts thinking [...] about Christ, Christ appears written in the mind and in the imagination. In the second moment, He appears drawn. In the third moment, He appears drawn with shading. In the fourth moment, He appears colored and ‘incarnato’. In the fifth moment, He appears ‘incarnato’ and in relief [...]”²⁸. The sacred image that the worshipper paints inwardly can be described as a real painting for the very reason that the latter is nothing but a metaphor of the higher reality that it legitimately evokes.

It is now clear why the real heirs of Antonello’s Annunciate are, rather than other paintings with the same subject, works that successfully grapple with the core motivations underlying Antonello’s revolutionary solution²⁹. The first step is significantly marked by Leonardo, the father of the “maniera moderna”. In a now lost painting, Leonardo overturned Antonello’s conception by representing the angel in the act of incarnating in the onlooker’s soul that same Word once incarnated in Mary’s womb³⁰ (Fig. 9). A further step is taken by Giovanni Cariani in his so-called Madonna of the doves in Bergamo (Fig. 10). Cariani, applying the same principle to the theme of the Presentation at the Temple, assigns to the onlooker the role of the High Priest who, after having dropped in the offerings box the five silver shekels for the redemption of the first-born, is preparing to sacrifice the two, unaware, little birds³¹. Finally, we can recall Sebastiano Del Piombo’s striking Christ bearing the cross in the Prado³² (Fig. 11). Here the Word itself comes towards us in His suffering flesh as He did once to Veronica on the road to Golgotha. His face is destined to impress itself not on a worthless piece of cloth, but on the compassionate heart of the spectator. Many of the sacred paintings of the Italian old masters, as well as being sublime artistic masterpieces in their own right, are also important documents of a lively and complex religious history.