Madonna with Child

Antonello da Messina matters out of all proportion to how little of his work survives, because he was the painter who carried the new northern art of oil painting into Italy. Working down in Sicily, far from Florence, he learned to build up thin, glowing layers of oil the way the Flemish masters did, and other Italians took the method from him. This small Madonna and Child is one of his early efforts in that technique, from around the 1460s. You can see what oil let him do in the tiny hard sparkle of the jewels in the Virgin's crown and the sheer, almost transparent veil over her hair. The National Gallery stays cautious, labelling it only as possibly his own hand.