Niccolò Antonio Colantonio

Niccolò Antonio Colantonio was the leading native painter of Naples in the middle of the 15th century, at a moment when the city's art was a crossroads of styles. Naples then looked north as much as south, and Colantonio worked in the detailed, glowing manner of Netherlandish painting, all sharp objects and careful light, rather than the Florentine taste for grand sculptural figures.

His best-known surviving work shows Saint Jerome in his study, the scholar-saint gently pulling a thorn from a lion's paw while books, papers and small objects crowd the shelves around him, each one painted with obsessive care. It once formed part of a large altarpiece for the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Naples.

Colantonio is remembered most of all for a pupil. A document records that Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian who would carry oil painting and that jewel-like northern technique across Italy, trained in Colantonio's Neapolitan workshop between about 1443 and 1450.