Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, c. 1480, tempera and gold on wood, 37.8 x 25.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
A conversation between Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Steven Zucker.
Introduction
Carlo Crivelli was born in Venice, but spent much of his career painting in the Marches region of the Italian Peninsula. Today he is considered an innovative early Renaissance painter because of his interest in surface decoration, lavish use of gold, and strong contour lines that pick out forms. Also characteristic of Crivelli’s artistic mode is his pairing of hyper-realistic elements with flat, less naturalistic forms. Here, the Virgin Mary’s face seems flat, like wax or porcelain, but her halo and clothes suggest his interest in naturalistic details and textures.
Map of Italy with the Marches region indicated (underlying map © Google)
The Madonna and Child was a popular Christian subject that Crivelli painted on many occasions, either for altarpieces or small devotional panels. Some of these smaller paintings were undoubtedly made for private devotion, such as this one (the frame is not original). Many of these Marian images also include a similar array of motifs: a fly, cucumbers, apples, a cracked marble ledge, and a cloth of honor. He typically includes a cloth of honor draped behind Mary to emphasize her importance. The fly, cucumbers, and apples had symbolic meaning, but also allowed Crivelli to show off his artistic skill by painting interesting textures. The cracked marble ledge was one way to add an all’antica (or “from the antique”) element to his painting.
Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, c. 1480, tempera and gold on wood, 37.8 x 25.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY SA-NC 2.0)
The use of gold in many of his paintings, including this Madonna and Child, also indicates the importance of the two holy figures. There is gold on their halos and clothes. The gold also speaks to the global flow of materials at this time, with much of the gold in Europe coming from sub-Saharan Africa.
Mary’s elaborate brocade clothing also points to the textile trade at this time. The design on the painted brocade looks similar to designs found on textiles imported from the eastern or southern Mediterranean regions. In the 15th century, certain areas of Italy, including Florence, also became important centers of textile production, and often replicated designs of foreign textiles.
The detailed landscape on either side of Mary also includes turbaned figures who likely to represent Turks and/or Jews. At the time Crivelli was painting, the Ottomans had taken control of the Holy Land. Jews were also sometimes shown wearing turbans.Their presence here likely situated the painting geographically, helping viewers identify the scene as taking place in the Holy Land.
Key points
- Early renaissance art
- Iconographic symbols (apple, cucumber, pearls, goldfinch, fly, turbans)
- Trompe l’oeil
- Islamic and Italian textiles
- Northern (Flemish) renaissance influences
- Antique (all’antica) elements
- Private devotion
- Artist’s signature
Test yourself with a quiz!
Crivelli, Madonna and Child
Additional resources:
Carlo Crivelli: The Italian Renaissance Artist Who Played with Space and Perspective on ArtUK
Read more about this work from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Learn more about the expanding the renaissance initiative
See more of Crivelli’s art in the National Gallery of Art, London
Stephen John Campbell, C. Jean Campbell, Francesco De Carolis, Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015)
Ronald Lightbown, Carlo Crivelli (Yale University Press; 1st edition, 2004)
For the classroom
Take notes while watching the video, using the Crivelli Active Video Note-Taking.
Discussion questions
- Compare Crivelli’s Madonna and Child with his Annunciation with Saint Emidius. What does this comparison tell us about Crivelli’s artistic output?
- Compare Crivelli’s painting with other iterations of the Madonna and Child, including Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna or Jan van Eyck’s Madonna in the Church. How do they all relate to early renaissance developments? In what ways do they differ?
- In what ways does Crivelli’s painting help us to think about stereotyping in the renaissance?
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at this tiny little painting, but there’s such a level of detail here. You could be lost in this painting for hours.
Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank: [0:16] We’re looking at a painting of the Madonna and Child by the artist Carlo Crivelli, from around the year 1480. The painting has beautiful details, such a richness to the landscape that we’re seeing and to the fabrics that we see throughout this painting.
Dr. Zucker: [0:30] We’re seeing a really common theme. We’re seeing the Virgin Mary holding the young Christ Child. He sits on a pillow, and is balanced on a ledge. This is a scene that we see over and over again, especially in Venice. It’s worth noting Crivelli is Venetian, although he spent most of his career south of Venice in The Marches.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [0:49] Mary and Jesus are set before a parapet that is draped with this beautiful piece of yellow silk. Then behind the Virgin Mary we see another piece of silk in a lavender color.
[0:59] It’s being held up by red laces that then are winding around branches, from which are growing apples and a cucumber.
Dr. Zucker: [1:08] Almost everything in this painting is symbolic. We’re treated to this lavish, beautiful detailed scene, but it’s a painting that actually offers much more to people who speak the language of art in the 15th century.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [1:19] The apples are symbols of the Fall, for instance, or the sin of humankind. If you think about Eve being tempted in the Garden of Eden by the serpent, with the Tree of Knowledge with the apple.
Dr. Zucker: [1:30] Those red laces that hold up that beautiful pink-lavender cloth of honor almost look serpent-like as they reach over, almost as if the ends of those laces are the heads of the serpent.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [1:41] Another common symbol we see is the goldfinch, this little bird that the baby Jesus is grasping to his chest, and the goldfinch is a symbol of redemption.
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] That plays in direct opposition to the apple. If Adam and Eve caused the fall of man, in this Christian iconography, Jesus is the redeemer.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [2:00] One of my favorite details in this painting is the fly on the lower left. It is actually another symbol of sin in this painting. The fly is actually painted in trompe l’oeil, or this trick of the eye, where it’s proportionate to us, the viewers, and not proportionate to the Virgin Mary and Child.
Dr. Zucker: [2:16] It’s actually terrifyingly large in relationship to the Christ Child. In fact, it’s as large as Jesus’ feet.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [2:23] It’s supposed to look like the fly has just landed on the surface of the painting. It’s another common symbol of sin in the Renaissance.
[2:30] By this point, around 1480, you have the influence of Northern, particularly Flemish painting, on parts of Italy. We really get a sense of that here in the background, in the landscape.
Dr. Zucker: [2:40] The landscape, which we only see via the extreme left and right, just peeking out at the edges of the cloth of honor, goes into this beautiful deep space, and we’re given pathways for our eye to travel. In that landscape, we actually see figures. These are clearly not modern western European figures.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [2:59] The figures that we see in the background are all wearing turbans. Now, at this point in the Renaissance, there is a trope of showing peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean wearing turbans because, by 1480, the Holy Lands are controlled by Muslim powers.
[3:13] Using the turban was a convention for locating people in the Holy Lands. It became a symbol of Others, so you not only see Muslims wearing turbans, but you also sometimes see Jews wearing turbans as well.
Dr. Zucker: [3:24] Although this may not be historically accurate, it is still a way of locating the Virgin Mary in the Middle East. The artist uses another device to speak of antiquity, and we see that in the ledge that the Christ Child sits on. We can just make out that there’s some relief carving on our side of that ledge, and that’s mimicking ancient Roman motifs.
[3:45] We have a geographic locating to the Middle East and we have a temporal locating to the ancient world, although those symbols are separate.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [3:52] Another way that Crivelli locates this scene in the Middle East is the mantle worn by Mary. She’s wearing this very elaborate damask textile.
[4:01] While it’s not uncommon to see this type of textile, the motifs that we’re seeing on it speak to an aesthetic that you would find on Islamic textiles, even if by this point you have Italian textile makers replicating this type of pattern from the Eastern Mediterranean.
Dr. Zucker: [4:17] This is such a complicated issue, because we understand the Virgin Mary as having been very poor, but [she] is shown here in the most elaborate garb. That has to do in part with not only a way of symbolically representing the Virgin Mary’s spiritual importance but also because the East was associated with elaborate and very expensive textiles.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [4:38] We see that accentuated even by the halos, which are both done in gold, and they’re decorated with pearls and precious gems.
Dr. Zucker: [4:46] Actually those halos also remind me of Northern painting and the way that material wealth was used as a means of representing divinity.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [4:53] One of the things that I’m always struck by when looking at this painting is the juxtaposition between the intense illusionism of things like the cucumber and the apples, and even the textile that’s hanging behind Mary, and their faces or their bodies in general, where you have this flattening or this wax-like quality to the faces of both the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
Dr. Zucker: [5:14] The hypernaturalism that we see in the representation, for instance, of the cucumber — which is often used as a symbol of resurrection — has always seemed to me, in the work of Crivelli, as a means of representing the truth, the veracity, of what we’re seeing.
[5:27] There is a real distinction between forms like the cucumber and the flesh of the primary figures. I’m not sure that we fully understand what that contrast is meant to represent. Perhaps it has to do with the apples and the cucumbers being of this earth, and the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child as being spiritual figures.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [5:45] This painting was likely used for private devotion. It’s on a small scale, could easily be held or used on a private altarpiece, say, in a elite home. This type of painting is really common in Crivelli’s work overall.
Dr. Zucker: [5:58] Look at the hands that Crivelli has painted. Look at the delicacy with which the Virgin Mary holds the Christ Child. Her fingers are holding him in place, but if you look at her right hand, there’s a shadow between her hand and Jesus’ hip. The turn from her thumb to her forefinger mimics his side and creates a volume. It creates this marvelous sense of space, but also of the preciousness of the child that she holds.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [6:24] Crivelli has also signed this painting using a trompe l’oeil piece of paper at the bottom of the painting, and it says “Opus Karoli Crivelli Veneti,” which is locating this as done by Carlo Crivelli from Venice.
Dr. Zucker: [6:37] We can imagine somebody in a private home using this painting as a means of veneration. So although the forms that we see here may be foreign to us, for the person who commissioned this in the 15th century, each of these elements would have had meaning and would have combined with this exemplary painting to produce a powerful spiritual image.
[6:57] [music]
