A recent paper by Dr Charlene Vella, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art history at the University of Malta has proposed that Sicily’s Renaissance master Antonello da Messina’s nephews Antonio and Pietro de Saliba were, at some point during their stay in Venice between 1480 and c. 1495 assistants in Giovanni Bellini’s workshop.
Dr Vella presented her paper ‘Antonello’s nephews in Bellini’s bottega’ when she attended the Renaissance Society of America 2023 conference held between 9 and 11 March in San Juan in Puerto Rico. Her presentation was part of the ‘Art of Renaissance Venice’ panel organised by Daniel Wallace Maze from the University of Iowa and Lorenzo Buonanno from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Dr Vella’s paper presented evidence for Antonello da Messina’s nephews Antonio and Pietro de Saliba were, at some point during their stay in Venice between 1480 and c. 1495 assistants in Giovanni Bellini’s workshop.
Antonello da Messina was Sicily’s Renaissance master who was active in the fifteenth century. He was renowned for his advanced use of the oil technique, his chiaroscuro, and detailed realism. Giovanni Bellini was his near contemporary who, following Antonello’s stay in Venice between 1475 and 1476, embraced lessons learnt from Antonello and drastically improved his style and technique, later on accepting Antonello’s nephews in his workshop. Vella’s hypothesis was presented to the audience by way of overlays of paintings by the masters Antonello and Bellini onto those by the de Saliba brothers that effectively prove that the de Salibas had access both to Antonello’s cartoons or to-scale drawings of paintings, as well as those by Giovanni Bellini.
The paper also highlighted the fact that Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini must have been more than mere acquaintances, and probably even good friends, despite what legend would have us believe, namely, that Giovanni Bellini had to sneak into Antonello’s studio in order to “steal” Antonello’s “secret” which was his advanced knowledge of mixing oil as a binder with his pigments and thereby that the two were not well-acquainted.
This hypothesis presented was part of the research that was carried out by Dr Vella in the last decade on the painter nephews of Antonello da Messina who were active in Venice and Messina. While active in Messina, the more prominent artist of the two de Saliba brothers, Antonio, executed altarpieces and other small paintings for patrons in Eastern Sicily, Calabria and Malta, with paintings by him surviving in public collections in Rabat, Zejtun and Mdina. This research has been published in 2022 by Midsea Books in a monograph titled In the Footsteps of Antonello da Messina: the antonelliani between Sicily and Venice’.
The ‘Art of Renaissance Venice’ session was chaired by Patricia Fortini Brown Professor Emerita of Art & Archaeology at at Princeton University and author of Art and Life in Renaissance Venice and Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family, among several others. She also served as president of the Renaissance Society of America (2000-2002).