Almost half a century of Italian art history revisited in the light of Flemish art. An ideal historical map that traces the circulation of Flemish masterpieces in Italy, configuring their times, methods and intertwining. This book is the result of a research path that began in 1966, with two essays that appeared in the magazine Paragone, in which the author perceived the existence of a continuous web of relationships between Flemish and Italian painting. during the fifteenth century and tried to trace its first features. The case of the relations between Italy and Flanders is actually very peculiar compared to those that settled between Flemish painting and other artistic areas in Europe, where the Flemish impact was more clearly assimilated. In Italy, in fact, Flemish painting never managed to alter the historical course or to determine its physiognomy, precisely because the Peninsula in the 15th century was itself the scene of pictorial events of the highest level. Even more singular, therefore, is the fact that Italy represented the first and richest area of commission of Flemish painting, both mercantile and aristocratic, a phenomenon that at times assumed the proportions of a real fashion. Above all, the direct knowledge of Flemish specimens exerted such a great fascination on many of our painters that it resulted in a new enrichment in the pictorial rendering of reality. In the 15th century a bridge was built between these two pictorial universes, north and south of the Alps: this search for reality united both pictorial civilizations. The most striking example is Antonello da Messina, an almost bilingual Italian-Flemish painter, who arrived to reach the supreme Flemish subtlety and translate it into an equally supreme clarity of Italian space and form.