(Messina, documented from 1493; deceased between 1522 and 1526)
The Apostles James the Greater and Thomas,
oil on panel, 30.5 x 36 cm, unframed

Provenance:
European Private Collection

We are grateful to Mauro Lucco for confirming the attribution after examining the present painting in the original.

The present previously unpublished painting was most probably part of a larger group possibly including all of the Twelve Apostles, which was a fairly common subject in Sicily during the early 16th century. According to Lucco this is a typical work by Salvo d’Antonio, the nephew of Antonello da Messina and the son of his brother, Giordano, and may be compared to the predella in the Museum of the Cathedral of Mdina in Malta, which is signed “Magister Salvus de A[…]i Messanēsis me pinsit [.]510” . Even though the patronymic is largely lost, a document commissioning Salvo to produce a polyptych – from which the predella panel almost certainly comes – by the nuns of Saint Peter’s at Mdina in 1505, confirms the reading. Nevertheless some scholars deny the authorship of the Maltese panel for unproven qualitative reasons, believing it to be a workshop piece, signed by the master but painted by others. However, the face of Saint James has very close affinities with that of a Saint Peter, itself derived almost literally from its namesake in the above-mentioned predella, in another panel in the Museum of the Cathedral of Mdina, which might have been part of the same documented polyptych.

In the present composition the two saints are shown against the sky within a space enclosed by crenellated walls, interpretable as the celestial Jerusalem. The identifying texts, in characters that are still Gothic, run on a high parapet right in the foreground. While James holds the pilgrim’s staff, alluding to his having reached the ends of the earth in his evangelising mission, Thomas is shown counting off the main points of the discussion on his fingers. The volumetric abstraction of that hand, with the distinctive fingers, makes it possible to attribute a Madonna and standing Child in a private collection (formerly in the collection of Michele Begarelli, Milan) to Salvo d’Antonio and not Antonello de Saliba, as was hitherto thought to be the case, on the suggestion of Fiocco and Bottari (La Pittura del Quattrocento in Sicilia, Messina Florence 1954, pp. 59-60, pl. CXXX, fig. 154).

However, while there is no longer any doubt that the present panel and the Maltese predella were painted by the same artist, there remains the fundamental problem, and one that is difficult to resolve, of Salvo’s stylistic traits: the incompatibility between his firmly-attributed works of Calatabiano (1502) and Mdina, of 1510, and the magnificent Dormition of Mary destroyed in the Messina earthquake of 1908, commissioned for the city’s cathedral in 1509. Only a small fragment of the lower part survives of this work, with the stone plaque containing texts, conserved in the storerooms of the Galleria Regionale di Messina. As such, in the same year two pictures of such disparate quality were produced, appearing to be the work not only of two different artists, but also of two different cultural generations: the first wholly linked to more archaic formulae established by Antonello da Messina, the other a “splendid compendium of much Italian culture of those years” (R. Longhi, Frammento siciliano,1953, now in: Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio e altri studi sul Quattrocento, 1910-1967, Florence 1975, p. 174). Our fragmentary knowledge of Sicilian painting of those years does not allow us to go beyond a working hypothesis which as yet is without solid points of reference.

We are grateful to Mauro Lucco for cataloguing the present painting.