Antonello da Messina c.1430-1479
Italian painter

Born in Messina, he was the only major 15th-century Italian artist to come from Sicily. An accomplished master of oil painting, he helped popularize the medium, although Giorgio Vasari's claim that he brought his tutor Jan van Eyck's oil-painting technique to Italy is incorrect (he did not know van Eyck and is unlikely to have visited northern Europe). His style is a delicate synthesis of the northern and Italian styles. In 1475 he was working in Venice, where his work influenced Giovanni Bellini's portraits. There are fragments of his Venetian San Cassiano altarpiece in Vienna. His first dated work, the Salvator Mundi (1465), and a self-portrait are in the National Gallery, London.