Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo and a Penitent Saint Jerome Come to Market at Sotheby’s

Ecce Homo (recto) and St. Jerome in Penitence (verso), double-sided panel, tempera grassa on panel, Antonello da Messina, circa 1430-1479

The most important Renaissance painter active in southern Italy, Antonello da Messina produced this extraordinary double-sided panel in the early 1460s, while working in his native Messina. An artist of remarkable originality, Antonello fused a Netherlandish mastery of descriptive realism with an Italian concern for emotional expression and pictorial presence, a synthesis especially evident in the psychological immediacy with which Christ confronts the viewer here. The panel exemplifies Antonello’s empathetic approach to devotional imagery, humanizing an intensely sacred subject through a direct and intimate mode of address that invites emotional identification and spiritual engagement.

Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio was born in Messina, in northeastern Sicily around 1430. One of the most compelling yet elusive figures of the Italian Renaissance, his career remains only fragmentarily documented, and the precise means by which he mastered Netherlandish painting techniques remain the subject of scholarly debate. Antonello probably trained in the workshop of Niccolò Colantonio in Naples, a city with unusually strong artistic and commercial ties to Northern Europe. King Alfonso of Aragon’s collection, for instance, included paintings by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, which Antonello may have encountered directly or experienced indirectly through Colantonio. Giorgio Vasari later credited Antonello with introducing oil painting to Italy, though that claim is now regarded as an overstatement. Antonello’s early career was likely peripatetic, possibly including travel to Provence and other regions, though the absence of archival records renders this speculative. By 1457 he had returned to southern Italy, where he was contracted by the confraternity of San Michele dei Gerbini in Reggio Calabria to paint a processional banner. By January 1461 he had settled in Messina, where he probably produced the present painting and where he likely remained for much of the decade.

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Live auction begins on: February 5, 10:30 AM EST