The Male Portraits of Antonello da Messina

Mezzi, Giulia

Item

The Male Portraits of Antonello da Messina

Mezzi, Giulia

Abstract

I decided to concentrate my thesis on the portraits of Antonello da Messina, because I was highly fascinated by the exhibition about the Sicilian artist, which was installed last year in Rome, in the Scuderie del Quirinale. As mentioned in the beginning of the essay. portraiture might be considered as the most powerful art among Renaissance painting and personally, I think that it is also among the most appealing works a painter could craft. The portrait as conceived by Antonello da Messina, has a highly private dimension and his works are lifelike reproductions of people who lived more than 500 years ago - and who is not curious to know how theses people looked like and who they were? Moreover, Antonello's sitters are not remote emperors raised on a throne and displaying their richness, but people of a middle-high class, who were living in the first milieus of a modem life, made of a blooming trade and instruction for a wider range of people. In fact. as we were also able to notice in this essay, the most asked question among art historians was to find out the identity of the portrayed subject, often holding to merely unlikely stories or theories. Probably we will ever be able to find out for sure who the sitter was (»« given the lack of documentation, nevertheless we won't be unsatisfied by observing the unknown subject, since in the end it does not really matter to know who these people were, but what we aim for is to grasp as much as information as possible from the portrayal of their features. No matter if Antonello's sitters might look sympathetic to us or not, they notice our presence and react with a smile or by simply responding to our gaze with an astonishing vividness, which makes us suddenly forget that what we have in front of us are 'only' figurative representations and not real persons. The deepness and intensity of Antonello's portraits, with blue or dark eyes, and the almost imperceptible eyelashes capture our intention both at the same time in a persuasive yet smooth way, leaving us enchanted and curious in front of their presence, for a moment transposed in a silent dialogue with a Renaissance interlocutor.