The 15th-century Italian painter Carlo Crivelli has long been overlooked. Some curators now argue that his work offers a sophisticated and self-conscious exploration of reality and illusion.
When Bernard Berenson, the art historian and tastemaker, was advising Isabella Stewart Gardner on acquisitions for her collection, in 1897, he urged her to purchase a small panel that depicted St. George on horseback slaying a dragon, by the fifteenth-century Italian painter Carlo Crivelli. “You never in your life have seen anything so beautiful for color, and in line it is drawn as if by lightning,” Berenson wrote to Gardner, from Fiesole.
Yet when it came to writing “Italian Painters of the Renaissance,” Berenson’s influential survey from 1930, he more or less wrote Crivelli out of art history. Although Crivelli was mentioned, and indeed praised—“He takes rank with the most genuine artists of all times and countries, and does not weary even when ‘great masters’ grow tedious,” Berenson wrote—he was dispensed within a few lines, whereas Titian, Tintoretto, Giovanni Bellini, and others were granted pages of attention.
Berenson’s dodge dismays Jonathan Watkins, the director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, in the Midlands of England, and a Crivelli aficionado. “If you say, ‘Look, we don’t have a model to accommodate Crivelli’—and, rather than changing the model, you don’t accommodate anything, how could you live with yourself?” Watkins told me recently.
The same playfulness or confusion of scale occurs in a number of Crivelli’s works, perhaps for the artist’s own pleasure, given that his pieces were often originally displayed high up in dimly lit ecclesiastical spaces, out of range of close perusal. An altarpiece in the National Gallery’s collection includes a panel that depicts St. Thomas Aquinas holding what at first looks like an architectural model of a church.
Once a viewer starts to look out for such peculiarities, they are everywhere in Crivelli’s paintings. He is not the only artist, in the fifteenth century or after, to supply his works with images of flies, which traditionally are taken to signify physical or moral decay. The exhibition includes a small panel, perhaps originally part of a now lost altarpiece, depicting St. Catherine; she stands in a recessed niche, with the spiked wheel of her martyrdom by her side.
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