Pietro de Saliba
1450 · Italian · Renaissance
The story
Pietro de Saliba belonged to a painting family built around one towering relative, Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian master who brought a new, glowing precision to Italian painting. Saliba was his nephew, and like his brother Antonio he learned the family manner and carried it on.
He seems to have come north to Venice in the 1490s, where the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, the city's leading painter, drew talent from across Italy, before working mainly in and around Messina in Sicily. Little of his life is firmly documented, and he is known above all as a faithful keeper of his uncle's style, down to copying Antonello's own compositions.
One of those, a version of the solitary Virgin of the Annunciation, hangs today in the Accademia in Venice, close to the Antonello it descends from.
