Antonello da Messina, born in Messina, Sicily and apprenticed while quite young to the painter Colantonio del Riore in Naples, the nearest cosmopolitan center, had gained exposure here to Flemish artists because of the French and Spanish rule that obtains there.

A lost van Eyck panel of St. Jerome in His Study, known to have been in Naples in 1456, may be the inspiration for one of Antonello's earliest pictures on the same subject, painted around 1460.

Antonello's earliest signed work, Salvator Mundi, painted in 1465, displays a similarly obvious Netherlandish cast.