Looking up Antonello da Messina in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, you learn that he was “a person of good and lively intelligence, of great sagacity, and skilled in his profession,” and that, after having studied for many years in Rome, he worked for a considerable time in Palermo, before returning to “his native place, Messina.” Most important, when Antonello saw a painting by “Johann of Bruges”—Jan van Eyck—in Naples, “painted in oil in such a manner that it could be washed, endure any shock, and was in every way perfect,” he was “so strongly impressed by the liveliness of the colors and by the beauty and harmony of that painting” that he dropped everything and went to Flanders. There, he “became very intimate with the said Johann, making him presents of many drawings in the Italian manner and other things.” The said Johann found this supply of Italian art so irresistible that he taught his Sicilian admirer everything he knew about painting with oil, after which Antonello “returned from Flanders in order to revisit his native country and to communicate to all Italy a secret so useful, beautiful, and advantageous.” But after a few months in Messina, he went to Venice, “where, being a man much given to pleasure and very licentious, he resolved to take up his abode and finish his life, having found there a mode of living exactly suited to his taste. And so, putting himself to work,