St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata
Location: Portland Art Museum
City: Portland, Oregon
Artist: Carlo Crivelli
Contents
Artist Biography
About the Painting
Related Links and Resources
References
Artist Biography
Carlo Crivelli (Venice? ca. 1430 – 1495 Ascoli Piceno)
Carlo Crivelli was one of the fifteenth-century artists most admired by Victorian collectors. He is best known as a specialist in painting devotional panels and polyptych altarpieces. Born to a family of painters, he probably learned the fundamentals of painting from his father, Ser Jacopo, and eventually assumed responsibility for training a brother named Vittore (ca. 1444 – 1501). Carlo most likely trained in the workshop of Antonio Vivarini (d. ca. 1476-84), where he would have learned the precepts of archaic Venetian Gothic painting. Lessons likely included proper construction of architectural settings, creating pastiglia surrounds for prominent figures, achieving enhanced chiaroscuro effects, and designing elaborate altarpiece frameworks.
In 1497, Crivelli expanded his repertoire by studying with the Paduan school run by Francesco Squarcione. From Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1430 – 1506) he borrowed bold black figural contours, dramatic foreshortening, and drapery rendering using a basecolor for midtones and basecolor tints for highlights. An awareness of works by Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1431 – 1516) may have inspired Crivelli to adopt minute hatching in black paint as his chosen method for rendering form and might have also sparked his interest in mixing tempera paint with drying oils. The limited palette that Crivelli employed was indicative of his discretion, rather than scarcity of artists’ materials in the provincial towns where he lives for much of his life. Crivelli was awarded an honorary non-military knighthood that was bestowed upon only a few painters in 1489. Crivelli apparently died suddenly in 1495, and his reputation declined precipitously until it was revived by nineteenth-century collectors.
About the Painting
There is a strong possibility that this panel is one of the twelve paintings in a similar narrow format that once adorned the framework for the high altar for the Duomo of Camerino. This altarpiece, commissioned in May 1488 and slated to be more than thirteen feet high, was one of the last and most ambitious works that Crivelli completed. Art historian Federico Zeri has argued that the dozen small panels now dispersed in museum collections throughout the world were once presented in two groups of six on either side of a triptych comprised of the immense carved and gilded Madonna della Candeletta (Pinacoteca di Brera) and side panels depicting Saints Peter and Paul and Saints Cyprian and Jerome (Venice Accademia). Each of the proposed predella panels is presented in a carved trefoil frame and includes a distinctive cherub head above the figure.
Related Links and Resources
Conservation of Carlo Crivelli’s Triptych of St. Dominic: Video interview with the chief conservator at the Brera National Gallery of Art regarding the conservation of Carlo Crivelli’s Triptych of Saint Dominic
Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice: Interactive website created in conjunction with the 2015 exhibition held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Shedding New Light on a Renaissance Master: California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology Includes a link to a downloadable 24-minute video that describes the collaboration between the San Diego Museum of Art and University of San Diego Center for Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). The goal of the project was to compile a comprehensive set of diagnostic tools for the painting and provide museum visitors with an interactive experience of the research findings.
Conservation case studies: Building a frame for ‘The Virgin and Child’ by Carlo Crivelli: Victoria and Albert Museum Chronicles the construction of a reproduction frame for a Crivelli which had been presented in an historically inaccurate frame since the 1930s.
References
Bomford, David, and Rachel Billinge. Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings. London: National Gallery Co.; Distributed by Yale University Press, 2002.
Bewer, Francesca G. A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900-1950. Cambridge, Mass.; New Haven: Harvard Art Museum; Yale University Press, 2010, 110-11, fig. 3.16.
Casavecchia, Barbara. “La tecnica di Carlo Crivelli.” Kermes: La Rivista del Restauro 10, no. 30 (1997): 12–19.
Dunkerton, Jill. “Artist/Conservator Materials: The Restoration of Crivelli’s The Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels.” In Early Italian Paintings: Approaches to Conservation: Proceedings of a Symposium at the Yale University Art Gallery, April 2002, edited by Patricia Sherwin Garland, 238–246. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2003.
Dunkerton, Jill, and Raymond White. “The Discovery and Identification of an Original Varnish on a Panel by Carlo Crivelli.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 21 (2000): 70–76.
Dunkerton, Jill, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, and Nicholas Penny. Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in The National Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with National Gallery Publications, 1991, 174, 184, 201, 332-335.
Mongan, Agnes, John Coolidge, José Luis Sert, George Leslie Stout, and Elizabeth H. Jones. Edward Waldo Forbes, Yankee Visionary. Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1971, 124-127.
Gallone Galassi, A., F.G. Albergoni, B. Basso, and L.M. Recalcati. “Panneaux D’artistes Des Marches Du XVme Siècle de La Pinacothèque de Brera: Étude Des Matériaux et Des Techniques.” In ICOM Committee for Conservation 7th Triennial Meeting: Copenhagen, 10-14 September 1984: Preprints, edited by Diana de Froment, 84114–84117. Paris: International Council of Museums, 1984.
Liang, Haida, David Saunders, and John Cupitt. “A New Multispectral Imaging System for Examining Paintings.” Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 49, no. 6 (2005): 551–562.
Lightbown, Ronald W. “The Altarpiece for the High Altar of the Duomo of Camarino, 1488.” In Carlo Crivelli. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 419-435.
Lloyd, Christopher. “Carlo Crivelli.” In Italian Paintings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection, edited by Martha Wolff, 72-75. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with Princeton University Press, 1993.
White, Raymond, and Jennifer Pilc. “Analysis of Paint Media.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 14 (1993): 86–94.