Art: Most Tender Pity

The late Bernard Berenson had nothing but affection for the work of the isth century Italian Artist Carlo Crivelli. But when B. B. came to write his authoritative studies of Italian Renaissance painters, he felt obliged to leave Crivelli out. Though the artist was the contemporary of Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, he remained, in Berenson’s opinion, essentially an exponent of the Late Gothic spirit—superb in his way, but “the product of stationary, if not reactionary, conditions.” Last week 80 works by Crivelli and his followers were shown in the Doges’ Palace of Venice in an exhibition designed to remove the stigma from Crivelli. The works, many of them panels from polyptychs that have not been seen as a whole for generations, come from scores of U.S. and European museums and churches—a sumptuous splurge of color surpassed by no other exhibition put on this summer.

Carlo Crivelli bounds into history with an entry in the ledger of the Venetian court, which on March 7, 1457, fined him 200 lire and sentenced him to six months in prison. The sentence was not particularly harsh, for Crivelli, it seems, had abducted a married lady named Tarsia and kept her hidden in his brother’s house for months. The court records refer to him as a painter, and historians think that he may have been about 25 at the time. But aside from this adventure in “abduction, adultery and concubinage,” the few scraps known about Crivelli indicate a perfectly respectable life.

The Loner. Son of a painter, Crivelli studied under the Paduan master Francesco Squarcione, who also taught Andrea Mantegna. Squarcione was a perfectionist who made his pupils spend day after day copying veined marble and Roman bronzes, the more intricate the better. Their paintings were fastidious, and their surfaces glowed like enamel. Crivelli never lost his sternly disciplined technique or his ability to make a canvas sparkle as if he had been working, not with brush and paint, but with gold and jewels.

They were attributes prized by his contemporaries. Prince Ferdinand of Capua, for instance, made Crivelli a knight, and in his later years Crivelli proudly signed his paintings with his Latin title “Miles.” But essentially, he was a loner. Though he had lived in Venice, he spent most of his life in the hilly region called The Marches on the Adriatic. There he worked alone, perfecting a style that has intrigued and puzzled critics ever since.

Wild Gentleness. On the surface, his Mary Magdalene (see overleaf) seductive though she may be, seems an excessive display of virtuosity, as stilted and brittle as a piece of porcelain. But there is nothing static about the Massa Fermana polyptych. From the wild gentleness of John the Baptist to the virile saintliness of the great Pope (sometimes identified as Gregory, sometimes as Sylvester) to the sweet composure of the Madonna, the emotions change, though so subtly and silently as to be almost imperceptible. Crivelli’s paintings, said Berenson himself, are “full of the deepest contrition, most tender pity, and mystical devotion . . . He takes rank with the most genuine artists of all times and countries, and does not weary even when ‘great masters’ grow tedious.”