The Blog got a new logo. I wanted it to be a tribute to the most important Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina (1430 –1479) to express my efforts to fostering awareness of Sicilian Cultural Heritage. Antonello is an iconic figure for Sicilians. He was Sicily’s Renaissance Master and he’s recognized as one of the Quattrocento’s most influential European painters. He combined the Flemish interest for detail with the Italian taste for simplicity and his influence on Italian painting was enormous. Giorgio Vasari wrote that he was the first to introduce oil painting in Italy. He had a strong impact on northern Italy painters, especially in Venice, with his own style influenced by Early Netherlandish painters whose paintings he could see during his training in Naples. The town together with Sicily had a fervent period of artistic and economic activity under the reign of the humanist king Alfonso V. He spent some time in Naples and in Venice but he lived and painted most of his life in his own Sicily. Unfortunately, as often happened for other Sicilian geniuses, he didn’t left a painting school behind him. He was another “meteor in Sicilian sky”. I chose for the logo the “Portrait of a Man”, oil on panel, at the Museo Mandralisca in Cefalù, one of the few of his paintings still in Sicily. A clearly Sicilian looking subject with a lively and somewhat teasing smile.
The portrait’s paint film in the blog’s logo is peeling off and reveals the underdrawing of the iconic smile. This to pass on the mission of the blog: deliver “open source” material, ideas, technical and methodological innovation in Cultural heritage Science and convey the concept that Cultural Heritage Science allows to study and understanding the inner structure of art objects.
The logo is going to be in stationary and online electronic material and even the next videos will have it in the intro.
