Renaissance radical: Carlo Crivelli – Shadows on the Sky at Ikon Gallery reviewed

‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry.’ She didn’t even mention the renaissance painter’s curious cucumber fetish. Nor the unwittingly comedic homoeroticism of his portrait of Saint Roch, one stocking rolled down coquettishly to reveal a decorous inner-thigh wound. Nor the extraordinarily ugly baby Jesus clutching an apple as big as his head while his mother, understandably, averts her eyes. ‘Camp is playful, anti-serious,’ argued Sontag.

Sontag wasn’t alone in not taking Crivelli (c.1430–95) seriously. Giorgio Vasari, who scorned the illusionism that some have taken to be Crivelli’s USP, erased him from his art history. Crivelli was Derren Brown with a paintbrush and so not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Mantegna or da Vinci. Martin Davies, the director of the National Gallery in the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite presiding over one of the world’s best collections of Crivelli’s paintings, dismissed his work. While his contemporary Bellini was ‘preparing Venetian painting of the High Renaissance’, Davies argued, Crivelli was ‘on an agreeably high-class holiday far away from great pictures and the aesthetic problems they pose’.

Now, finally and in Birmingham, Carlo Crivelli is being taken seriously. The Ikon’s outgoing director Jonathan Watkins posits Crivelli as a proto-postmodern breaking the fourth wall of pictorial representation when no one else bothered much with such ideas until Brecht and Baudrillard. More significantly yet, Watkins highlights how Crivelli depicted a transcendental spiritual reality with a profundity that doubtless appealed to his mostly Franciscan patrons.

Look at the heavens above the prayerful monk in ‘The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele’ (c.1489). Crivelli’s campy trompe-l’oeil swag of apples and pears casts a shadow on the painted sky.