Carlo Crivelli, “Madonna and Child”, 1480, Tempera and Gold on Panel, 37.7 x 25.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Carlo Crivelli was probably the most individual of the 15th century Venetian painters, an artist whose highly personal and mannered style carried Renaissance forms into an unusual expressionism.
Crivelli’s works were exclusively sacred in subject. Although his classical, realistic figure types and symmetrical compositions follow the conventions of Renaissance painting, his unusual overall treatment transforms these conventions into a personal expression that is both highly sensuous and strongly Gothic in spirit. Crivelli’s figures, clad in richly patterned brocades that are painted with an almost incredible attention to detail, are closely crowded together in sumptuously ornamental settings to produce flat, hieratic compositions that are devotional and removed from the world of the viewer.
His unique use of sharp outlines surrounding every form and the excessive pallor and flawlessness of complexion in his figures give his scenes the quality of shallow sculptured relief. There is an exaggerated expression of feeling in the faces of his figures, usually pensive and dreamy but sometimes distorted with grief, and in the mannered gestures of their slender hands and spidery fingers; this expression is closer to the religious intensity of Gothic art than to the calm rationalism of the Renaissance.
In this painting the troupe-l’oeil details are played against the doll-like prettiness of the Madonna. The apples and fly are symbols of sin and evil and are opposed to the cucumber and the goldfinch, symbols of redemption. Crivelli’s signature is painted on what looks like a piece of paper attached to the watered-silk cloth with wax.