In Cicerone, A guide to the enjoyment of works of art in Italy, a milestone in the history of art, Jacob Burckhardt admits that in 1855 in the whole of Italy he does not know of paintings by Antonello da Messina that can “definitely be attributed to him apart from the portrait of a man with black hair and dressed in a fur coat in the Uffizi. Another one is in the Manfrin Gallery but is too high up on the wall to be able to examine.” One and a half centuries later it is possible to draw a more encouraging map, consisting in around twenty works found in Italy that can safely be attributed to Antonello da Messina, with an additional thirty if the horizons are extended beyond the borders. Approximately 20 paintings were produced during his brief stay in Venice, which lasted less than two years: that is the equivalent of 40 per cent of the entire catalogue of the almost 50 works attributed to him. Of the approximately 13 well-known portraits, no less than 9 were painted in Venice or commissioned by Venetians. However, of the artist’s many “Venetian” works, only one remained in the city. During Antonello’s life (approx. 1430-1479), a painter of many mysteries and already an established artist in 1457, many paintings that have been dated and/or documented exist that were mainly the fruit of the last ten years of his life. Many of his works were lost in Sicily and Calabria while his numerous “Venetian” paintings still exist but are no longer in the lagoon where only the Pietà remains in the Correr Museum. It was only recently that one of the oldest known works that we know of by the artist returned, painted during the Sicilian’s early period – it is the Virgin reading , formerly in the residence of the noble man Lanza di Trabia and then part of the Venetian collection of Luciana Forti degli Adimari. Some might be surprised that the largest number of paintings to survive by Antonello were created during his stay in the lagoon, definitely from August 1475 to March 1476, but perhaps even from the end of 1474 to the summer of 1476. Although brief, the period was “revolutionary.” On August 23, 1474, the artist was still in Sicily and he there agreed to execute Annunciation, which was meant to be completed by mid November. Formerly in the church of the Annunziata, Palazzolo Acreide, it is now in Siracuse, in the Regional Museum of Palazzo Bellomo. On September 14, 1476 he made the full payment for the considerable dowry for his daughter Caterinella in Messina, where he was to make his will on February 14, 1479, shortly before his death. During a period of not even twenty months in Venice, Antonello gave life to, experimented and created an intense and prolific palette – altarpieces, paintings with religious subjects commissioned privately, and portraits.