The lost master

Annunciate Madonna

There are several reasons why Antonello is not as well known today as artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Caravaggio, though he is undoubtedly their equal. First of all, a frustratingly small sample of his work still exists, for his beautiful city, founded by Greeks in Homer's times (circa 730 BCE), sits on one of the Mediterranean's major fault lines and has paid the price for the precarious location many times over... Second, that paramount maker of early modern artistic reputations, Giorgio Vasari, never traveled to Sicily...[and] as a result Vasari's biography of the Sicilian is almost entirely made up...

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