The Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina in Italy after purchase, where it will be exhibited and when

“Ecce Homo will have L’Aquila as its residence and all of Italy as its domicile. What could be Antonello da Messina’s residence in the year in which L’Aquila was the capital of culture? Then do you want it to appear in Messina, in Rome, in Florence, in all the most important museums? Do you want it not to go where you don’t expect it and where people need to see beauty and history? But L’Aquila is the capital city of culture.” And when will he arrive in L’Aquila? “I’ll pick him up in about forty days. The residence is in L’Aquila, at the Spanish Fort, then there will be many domiciles“.

The purchase

The precious double-sided panel was originally intended to be offered in Sotheby’s Master Paintings auction in New York but was withdrawn shortly before the sale following the strong interest shown by the Italian Ministry of Culture, which acquired the work – outside of the auction – for 14.9 million dollars (estimated 10-15 million dollars), equal to approximately 12.6 million euros.

What the painting represents

Dating to the early 1460s, the panel measures just 19.5 by 14.3 centimeters and has been the subject of long and solid critical success. It was Federico Zeri who made it known to the public in 1981, and it is precisely to his reconstruction that we owe the interpretation of the heavy consumption of the image of Saint Jerome, on the reverse, as the result of an intense private devotion: the work would have been transported in a leather bag and repeatedly kissed and rubbed. A reading also shared by Fiorella Sricchia Santoro, one of the greatest scholars of Antonello. In recent decades the painting has been exhibited in important international exhibitions, from the Scuderie del Quirinale to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, up to the major exhibition of 2019 at Palazzo Reale in Milan. It is therefore not a recent rediscovery, but a key work in the artist’s production who contributed to transforming the Byzantine iconography of the “man of sorrows” into a modern and very human representation of the suffering Christ, as well as spreading the oil technique of Flemish origin in Italy.