It depicts Fra Gabriele Ferretti, the guardian of the convent associated with the church, kneeling in prayer on the convent’s grounds, eyes raised to a vision of the Madonna and Child, who are represented within a gilded, lozenge-shaped mandorla apparently bursting from the canvas. Take, for example, the work that gave the exhibition its title, “The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele.” Crivelli painted it in about 1489, to hang in the Church of San Francesco ad Alto, in Ancona, the capital of the Marche region of Italy in which he spent most of his working life. “The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele,” ca. Within the considerable constraints of conventional religious iconography, but without the language developed centuries later by theoreticians of postmodernity, Crivelli made paintings that were as much about the nature of representation as about the divinity of Christ or the sacrifice of the saints represented within them. Rather, Watkins argues, Crivelli’s work should be understood as offering a sophisticated and self-conscious exploration of reality and illusion. Nor should they be relegated to a niche or ironic taste, as Susan Sontag implied in her famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in which she cited Crivelli’s paintings as an example of camp’s extravagance of style.
In the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Watkins and his co-authors made a persuasive case that Crivelli’s often weird and gnarly works should not be seen, as Berenson saw them, as a creative dead end. “How could you sleep at night, knowing that what you are dealing with is inadequate?” The gallery, which usually is devoted to contemporary art, recently mounted the United Kingdom’s first-ever show devoted to Crivelli, “Shadows on the Sky.” It featured nine radiant works on loan from the Vatican and the Berlin State Museums, as well as from institutions in the U.K., including several from the National Gallery, in London. “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.
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“A formula that would, without distorting our entire view of Italian art in the fifteenth century, do full justice to such a painter as Carlo Crivelli, does not exist,” he wrote.īerenson’s dodge dismays Jonathan Watkins, the director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, in the Midlands of England, and a Crivelli aficionado. The resulting art works did not fit into Berenson’s preferred narrative of Renaissance progress and innovation.
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Often, his art included such peculiarities as setting a figure represented within a frame of cracked masonry, or incorporating the strategic placement of fruit or vegetables, including what is either a girthy cucumber or a gourd. He worked in a style that was Gothic and mannered, with an idiosyncratic use of trompe-l’oeil. According to the National Gallery of Art, both his father and his brother were painters. Crivelli was born in Venice in the forteen-thirties. 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.
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. The painting, Berenson wrote, was “a picture which at the bottom of my heart I prefer to every Titian, every Holbein, every Giorgione.” The saint’s gilded armor and halo had been built up with the delicate application of gesso pastiglia, or paste-work, atop which the artist had layered paint and gold leaf, creating a glimmering, three-dimensional relief. The work, which measured thirty-seven by nineteen inches, and had once been part of a larger altarpiece, was exquisitely rendered. “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. George on horseback slaying a dragon, by the fifteenth-century Italian painter Carlo Crivelli. 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.
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