Christ Blessing

The little folded paper stuck to the ledge carries a date that has long puzzled scholars. In Latin it says that in the year 1465, in the eighth indiction, Antonello da Messina painted me. An indiction was a 15-year cycle used for dating documents, and the eighth falls in 1475 rather than 1465. The handling also looks like his work of the 1470s, so the National Gallery gives the date as apparently 1465. The image itself comes from the north, from devotional heads based on the legend of Christ's face printed on Veronica's veil. Look just above the raised hand. As the paint has thinned with age, the fingers in their first position have come through like a ghost. Antonello moved them and shortened the hand, so that it seems to reach out over the ledge toward you.