Carlo Crivelli

Carlo Crivelli (Venice, circa 1430 - Ascoli Piceno, 1495) was a singular Italian painter of the Renaissance period.

Born in a family of painters in the Northern region Veneto, where at the beginning of his career he has been influenced mostly by Squarcione, Vivarini and Mantegna, he left the area by 1458 to travel to the Center of Italy and settled in the Marche region, near Ancona. There, in a city far from all the main Renaissance sites -as Florence, Ferrara and Rome, but nevertheless with a prolific and culturally vibrant environment- he developed a distinctive and unique style. Despite being receptive of all the new developments, he still had a Late Gothic sensibility, combining for example a perfect use of perspective with a detailed and metallic style. He always painted with tempera, a technique much more suitable to his decorative taste and gilded backgrounds than oil.

His life is still not completely reconstructed, with sparse news from Venice, Padua, Zadar (today in Croatia), Ancona and Ascoli. The few news about his private life tell us about a man sentenced to prison in 1457 for an affair with a married woman, risking his own workshop due to an adultery charge. It is difficult to have a better comprehension of this artist, because of the fragmented information on his life and since there is only one complete polyptych left in its original frame – the Ascoli Piceno altarpiece, while all the others have been disassembled and divided among many different collections and museums.

He signed and dated almost all of his pictures, with variations of “CAROLVS CRIVELLVS VENETVS”. Thanks to this, we can follow his production from 1468 to 1493.

Crivelli’s settings are highly decorated, full of elaborate allegories, festoons and motifs of fruit, flowers and vegetables, all definite with a strong light and a dark marked contour. This style has often been compared with the one of Northern Renaissance painters’ trompe l’oeil, as Van Der Weyden. His works are entirely religious, mostly commissioned by orders as Franciscans and Dominicans around Ancona and Ascoli. Crivelli’s realistic style was appreciated for his spiritual quality, appropriate for images of visions, apparitions, sacrifices and meditations.

In 1480, a few years before The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, Crivelli also painted The Virgin and Child for San Francesco ad Alto. Today it is displayed at the Pinacoteca civica Francesco Podesti.