Virgin and Child
About the painting
Carlo Crivelli (ca. 1430-1495) was probably born in Venice where he may have been the pupil of Jacopo del Fiore or Giambono but his style shows also the influence of the school of Squarcione in Padua, especially his pupils: Mantegna, Marco Zoppo and Giorgio Schiavone. He had to flee Venice quite soon in his career and was living by 1465 in Zara in Dalmatia (now Zadar, Croatia), then a province of the Venetian Republic. By 1483 he had settled in Ascoli Piceno, the largest city in the southern Marches, where he died in 1495.
Read on
This painting is a small devotional picture showing a Madonna and Child embraced, standing before a parapet. The Madonna wears a lavish gilded stucco mantle in the Gothic fashion and stands before a dark red embroidered cloth of honour with on top a swag of fruits. In the background is a distant hilly landscape with green trees on the left and a leafless tree on the right, enlivened by the deep blue hues of the sky. Fruits and flowers in this composition enclose Christian symbolic meanings alluding to the life of Christ and are not therefore mere decorative devices. Pictures of this kind were very popular in the 15th century and appear to constitute an important part of Crivelli’s oeuvre.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- 492-1882
