Madonna and Saints

Antonello Da Messina (Messina c.1430 - Messina 1479)

This painting, consisting of three fragments, shows the Madonna and child with saints Nicholas of Bari , Anastasia (?) Ursula, Dominic and Helena (the latter not visible but on the over frame). It is all that remains of a pala (large altarpiece), commissioned by the Venetian patrician Pietro Bono for the church of San Cassiano in 1475/6. Two further fragments existed, one decorated with Saint George and a female saint, the other with Saint Sebastian, but these went missing in the 18th Century.

This massive picture was one of the earliest known Sacra Conversazione, that is a picture with a pictorial space that seems to be a continuation of real space where the figures appear to move within a single unified area. It was painted by Antonello da Messina. Unusually, this artist came from the south of Italy (probably from Sicily) where he acquired a knowledge of early Netherlandish oil painting techniques. This enabled him to paint in minute detail and resulted in an overall breadth of form rendered by brilliant colour, successfully portraying the effect of light on objects, materials and figures.

The painting was removed from this church in 1620 and sawn into pieces. After the middle of the 17th Century the artist was not connected with this picture until the 20th Century when the Hamilton inventories confirmed attributions being made by art historians on stylistic grounds. In the Hamilton inventory (M4/10) the surviving pieces of the pala are listed as 5 separate paintings (119-123) with three paintings with two saints depicted on each, one with one and the other with a Madonna and child. The large surviving three fragments are still to be seen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. They show in total four saints, two on two panels, with a central panel of a Madonna and child