Madonna and Child

Look at the fly. Crivelli painted it near the front of this small devotional panel around 1480, so convincingly that viewers have reached to brush it off. It is a joke and a warning at once. In the language of the time a fly stood for sin and decay, and it sits in a picture full of such signs, the apple by the child for the fall of man, a cucumber and a goldfinch for the promise of rescue and the human soul. Crivelli was a Venetian who spent his career in the hill towns of the Marche, and he never lost his taste for hard, jewel-bright surfaces. The brocade, the marble ledge, the fruit, all carry the same unblinking sharpness that makes that painted fly so easy to believe.