At the moment when Mantegna’s influence was at its height, it was happily modified in a realistic direction by the advent of Antonello da Messina.[74] Despite recent discoveries, the career of this great Sicilian realist remains obscure. Vasari imagined him a traveler in Flanders and a direct pupil of Jan van Eyck, whose invention of oil painting he was believed to have adopted. The legend is thoroughly discredited by newly discovered documents. Antonello came up in Sicily under the influence of visiting Spanish masters. From them he caught at second hand the point of view of Northern realism, from them he learned the advantages of the more fluid and lustrous oil vehicle. But he must also have seen and carefully studied fine paintings of the Flemish school. There were such in Sicily and at Naples. Antonello emerges about 1470 as the most energetic and truthful draughtsman of his time, and a portraitist of powerful character equipped with a new and better technique. In 1475 he was in Venice and Lombardy. Such portraits as the captain of mercenaries, Il Condottiere, Figure 226, at the Louvre, immediately set the standard for the entire region. We no longer find flat profiles, but heads perfectly drawn in three-quarters aspect, modelled minutely, but with no loss of character and effect. No such eye as Antonello’s, unless it were that of Piero della Francesca, had as yet applied itself to the problems of painting. Whether in the nude, in his St. Sebastians and Crucifixions, or in his rare interiors, such as the St. Jerome in his Study, Figure 227, in the National Gallery, he announced new perfections in lighting, modelling and perspective. He painted for the Church of San Cassiano at Venice a stately and massive Madonna which led the local painters in the direction of mass and monumentality. Recent criticism has recognised the mutilated central panel in the Vienna gallery. Antonello’s work imposes itself primarily by its mere intensity of existence. It has no charm, and no especial emotion. Precisely this impersonality makes it an admirable and safe model. Before his coming the Venetians had experimented with oil mediums, but they gladly adopted his lustrous enamels, and strong shadows. He returned soon to his native Sicily, where he died in 1479, but his brief sojourn in the North had left its stamp. Montagna of Vicenza, Cima of Conegliano, Buonsignori of Verona, Alvise Vivarini of Venice are among his conscious emulators, and all the figure painting of Venice assumes new gravity and authority. And we may mark his influence even in the leading masters of the new school, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.