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Antonello da Messina spent his career moving between worlds that rarely touched in the 15th century, Sicily, Naples, and eventually Venice, carrying with him a painting technique most Italian painters did not yet have. He learned pure oil painting, likely through Netherlandish paintings that had reached Naples, the technique Jan van Eyck had perfected in Bruges decades earlier, where thin, transparent layers of oil paint let a painter build up glossy highlights and soft shadow no Italian egg-tempera painter could match.

In 1475 he traveled to Venice and stayed about a year and a half. It was enough. Venetian painters, including the young painter Giovanni Bellini, absorbed his handling of oil paint and his way of modeling a face with soft gradations of light, changes that shaped Venetian painting for the following generation. Antonello's portraits from this period, close-cropped, three-quarter views against plain dark backgrounds, are some of the first in Italian art to give an ordinary sitter this kind of quiet, individual presence.

He returned to Messina, in Sicily, and died there in early 1479, a name still less known outside the cities he had actually painted in.