D. O. M.
Antonius pictor, praecipuum Messanae suae et Siciliae totius ornamentum, hac humo contegitur. Non solum suis picturis, in quibiis singulare artificium et venustas fuit, sed et quod coloribus oleo miscendis splendorem et perpetuitatem primus Italicae picture contulit summo semper artificium studio celebratus.
The death of Antonello was much regretted by many who were his friends, more especially by the sculptor Andrea Riccio, by whom the two undraped statues of Adam and Eve in marble, still to be seen in the court of the palace of the Signoria, were executed, a work accounted very beautiful.[1] Such was the end of Antonello, to whom our artists are certainly not less indebted for having brought the method of painting in oil into Italy, than they are to Giovanni da Bruggia for having invented it in Flanders. Both have benefited and enriched the art: for in consequence of this discovery, we have since had masters so excellent that they have almost attained the power of making their figures alive; and their services are all the more valuable, inasmuch as there is no writer by whom the knowledge of this mode of painting is ascribed to the ancients. Nay, could we certainly know that they had not been acquainted therewith, the present age might be said to have surpassed the ancients in the advance towards perfection made by the adoption of that method. But as nothing is said in these times which has not been said before, so perhaps is nothing now accomplished which has not been already done in times gone by; this, however, I pass over in silence, and will say nothing more concerning it,[2] but giving high commendation to those who, in addition to correct drawing, are continually adding something more to art, I proceed to write of other masters.
- ↑ Vasari has here mistaken the name of Andrea Riccio of Padua, for that of Antonio Riccio of Verona, whose name is on the work in question. —See Cicognara, Storia della Scultura, for a notice of Andrea Riccio. who was a celebrated master in bronze, well meriting to find place in the “Lives” of Vasari.
- ↑ Notwithstanding the attention that must have been awakened in Italy by the invention of Van Eyck, it does not seem to have had any very immediate consequences; on the contrary, the influence of the change which it was calculated to produce, appears to have been confined in the first instance to Venice and the Lombards. According to Zanetti, the first oil-painting executed in Venice was a St. Augustine, painted in the vear 1475, for the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, by Bartolommeo Viva-
