A conservative convict

At the moment, a whole room of the Sainsbury wing in the Nation- al Gallery is devoted to Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430-95), but even the author of this monumental, learned, and absorbing monograph would not claim that he is a household name. Perhaps he is too much of a one-off to merit that double-edged accolade, for all that his ‘Annunciation’ must be one of the most memorable pictures in Trafalgar Square.

Long before Caravaggio was kicking up fusses over how his artichokes were prepared or the outcome of a game of tennis, the bad boy artist was a recognised type. We know virtually nothing of Crivelli’s personal life, but it is not entirely uncharacteristic of his calling that he is first documented in 1457 in his native Venice being jailed for six months for the Casanova-like enterprise of linking his lot with a sailor’s wife and ‘having carnal knowledge of her in contempt of God and holy matrimony’. In Venice, he must have been a pupil of Antonio Vivarini, and when on his release from prison he proceeded to nearby Padua, he fell under the influence of Mantegna and the latter’s teacher, Squarcione. One of his fellow Squarcion- esques was a Dalmatian known to posterity as Giorgio Schiavone (i.e. the Slav), and it may have been in his company that Crivelli moved to Dalmatia, where he is recorded as a ‘citizen and resident’ of Zara in 1465. By 1468, however, he was back in Italy, in the Marches, then as now a somewhat out-of-the-way region of Italy, and his peripatetic days were over.

Almost all Crivelli’s substantial oeuvre consists of large-scale altarpieces or small-scale domestic Madonnas. Donor portraits and the highly characterised likenesses of his saints demonstrate his gifts as a profoundly quirky observer of his fellow man, but there are no independent portraits, and no mythologies.