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| Antonello da Messina Madonna and Child with St Nicholas of Bari, St Anastasia, St Ursula and St Dominic 1475-76 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Antonello da Messina St Sebastian ca. 1478 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
"To artists working in a seaport, long-distance travel did not present the same difficulties that it did to the landlocked, and the question facing anyone trying to "explain" the trajectory of Antonello's career is how much and where his travels may have taken him (Naples and Venice are the only destinations we are certain of). His artistic progression is truly breathtaking and transports us from the backwater of Hispano-Netherlandish devotional paintings, with their hard, linear effect, awkward draftsmanship, and heavily tooled, flat gold backgrounds, to some of the most cosmopolitan and exquisite examples of naturalistic description in European art, predicated on a complete mastery of the technique of oil painting (the aspect of Antonello's art to which Vasari attached such overriding importance, wrongly making him responsible for its introduction into Italy). His mature paintings convey as no one else's the brilliant light of Sicily, either depicted en plein air or filtered through the windows of those somber but elegant Sicilian palaces, constructed of the local warm brown stone that every visitor to the island remembers."
– from Keith Christiansen's biographical essay on Antonello da Messina for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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| Andrea Mantegna St Sebastian ca. 1457-59 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Andrea Mantegna Holy Family with St Elizabeth and St John the Baptist ca. 1485-88 distemper and oil on canvas Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas |
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| Andrea Mantegna Holy Family with St Elizabeth and St John the Baptist ca. 1495-1500 distemper and oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
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| Andrea Mantegna A Sibyl and a Prophet ca. 1495 distemper on canvas in grisaille Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Cima da Conegliano Enthroned Madonna and Child with Saints Peter, Romualdus, Benedict and Paul ca. 1495 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
"Cima probably arrived in Venice by the mid-1480s. Exactly where he trained is uncertain, but Giovanni Bellini's art influenced him early and for life. Cima changed his style little during his career. His pictures feature a refined sense of surface detail, statuesque figures, and a calm, meditative mood. Sharply directed light defines crisp landscapes and architectural settings. Cima repeated heads, figures and landscape motifs in many paintings, yet each picture was the product of numerous preparatory drawings. By the 1490s, when Bellini was decorating the Doge's Palace, Cima became Venice's leading altarpiece painter."
– biographical notes from the Getty Museum
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| Niccolò di Pietro St Benedict Tempted in the Wilderness ca. 1415-20 oil on panel Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan |
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| Bartolomeo Montagna Madonna and Child with a Saint ca. 1483 oil on panel Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool |
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| Domenico Veneziano Adoration of the Magi 1439 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Andrea del Verrocchio Virgin with the Seated Child before 1488 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
"Andrea di Michele Cione, called Verrocchio, first trained as a goldsmith and sculptor in marble and bronze, then took up painting sometime in the 1460s . . . but the only extant picture recorded as his, the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints (called the Madonna di Piazza, still in situ in Pistoia Cathedral), was, as the recent cleaning demonstrates, almost certainly executed by his pupil and heir, Lorenzo di Credi. A series of small devotional pictures, consisting mostly of half-length Madonnas, is equally problematic. While clearly in his style, these pictures in London, Berlin, and elsewhere, are disputed between the master and the various artists believed to have been his pupils – not only Credi, but also Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and even Leonardo da Vinci. The only painting of this type which is widely agreed to be autograph is the Virgin with the Seated Child in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin [directly above]."
– biographical notes from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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| Josse Lieferinxe St Sebastian tended by St Irene 1497 oil on panel Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Josse Lieferinxe Pilgrims at the Tomb of St Sebastian 1497 oil on panel Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
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| Josse Lieferinxe St Sebastian interceding for the plague-stricken 1497 oil on panel Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
Description of the plague
No remedy was found in change of food:
New arts availed not: physic was all vain,
Though learned of Chiron, Son of Phillyra,
Or of Melampus, Amythaon's child.
Bursting from Stygian gloom to light the suns,
Raged the pale fury, and before her drove
Disease and Dread, and ever day by day
Surged loftier, raising her insatiate head.
– from Virgil's Georgics, book 3 (plague in livestock) translated by L.A.S. Jermyn, 1945