The ANNOTICO Report
It never ceases to amaze me that people are SO ignorant about Sicily. I mean Italians, and Italian Americans, because no one really expects Americans to know much more than about Comic Books and TV Soap Operas.
Sicily, and Southern Italy as "Magna Grecia" far surpassed mainland Greece as the fountainhead of Culture. While Greece was stratified, stultified, and suffocating, it's most creative, independent, and achievement oriented citizens migrated to the land of opportunity: Magna Grecia.
Magna Grecia , [The cradle of the civilization] was settled
2,500 years ago by Greek merchants, adventurers, thinkers, and artists.
(For example, Pythagoras migrated, and Archimides was
the son of immigrants).
The area was previously only inhabited by a few
small tribes. The fruitful soil, navigable rivers, large forests, bronze
and silver mines offered enormous development possibilities. Larger cities
developed, such as Tarantum, Syracuse, Katane, Locri and Naxos.
In the 6th century BC a balance had arisen between the
powers of the Etruscan cities in the North of Italy, Magna Grecia, and
Carthage.
The expansion of the Etruscans had come to an end by
the foundation of Marseille (Phoenician/Carthage colony, c. 600 BC) and
other cities along the Ligurian coast, by the rising power of Carthage,
which was fed by large numbers of refugees from Phoenicia, who had fled
from Asia Minor following the Persian conquest (545 BC).
As we all know, later Rome sprang up and united the Etruscans,
Magna Grecia, and all their peninsular tribes, and vied with the Carthaginians
for control of the Mediterranean for almost a thousand years.
Then Rome fell, and the Barbarians drug Europe into the
Medievalism, from which the Italians then rescued Europe with the
Renaissance in the 12th century.
We are very familiar with the Renaissance in Northern
Italy largely due to the extreme number of Shakespeare plays set in Northern
Italy, and because the Northern Italians since "unification/occupation"
of Southern Italy showed unabashed bias in trumpeting the artistic achievements
of the North, and regional ethnocentrism in seemingly almost "burying"
the artistic achievements of the South.
Antonello da Messina is only one of those many
overlooked Sicilian Artists.
Review by Nicola Giacomo Aluigi Giuseppe Linza for
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently
hosting an exhibition of particular note (which should be especially noteworthy
to those of Italian heritage,) of the very talented (and to the average
public somewhat unknown) visionary artist Antonello da Messina (ca 1430
- 1479.) Antonello is one of the groundbreaking artists of his age, and
is certainly one of Sicily's and Italy's master painters of the Quattrocento.
Antonello da Messina born Antonello di Giovanni d'Antonio
in Messina, a small city on the periphery of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,
about 1430, responded to the great masters of Bruges and Brussels (including
use of their oil technique,) to the brilliant Provencal, Spanish and Netherlander
painters, and to the established giants of Italian art such as Fra Angelico,
Piero della Francesca and Mantegna, in a fresh and new direct manner. Although
he worked primarily in Sicily, Antonello's travels to Naples, where his
artistic formation took place, and Venice, which was a defining moment
in his career as it was there that he was commissioned to paint the principal
altarpiece, well regarded as his masterpiece, for the church of San Cassiano,
would prove to be highly influential.
Antonello had an enormous impact on painting. He created
highly unique and innovative images with a harmonious and geometrical clarity,
and included exquisite descriptive passages that took Italian painting
to an entirely new level. Antonello's work, such as the work at San Cassiano,
left great impact on such giants as Giovanni Bellini and other Venetian
masters.
This beautiful exhibition logically follows the recent
highly significant exhibits of both Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca.
It is a rare opportunity to have this work accessible in the United States
and is a must see for the New York art season.
The resulting catalogue is a highly recommended item.
Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance Master includes an informative
essay by Giaocchino Barbera and entries on seven works that will be seen
for the first time in the United States as part of a focus exhibition at
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including Antonello’s masterpiece, the
Virgin of the Annunciation from Palermo, whose haunting beauty has been
compared to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Giaocchino Barbera is Director, Museo Regionale di Messina.
Keith Christiansen is Jayne Wrightsman Curator and Andrea Bayer is Associate
Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Published in association with The Metropolitan Museum
of Art
Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (December
13, 2005 – March 5, 2006)