Pietà

The museum's own label gives this Pietà no date. It says only that Crivelli signed it and that it probably crowned a polyptych, a large altarpiece of several panels. The date usually attached to it comes from a reconstruction. In 1961 the art historian Federico Zeri identified it as the top of the altarpiece Crivelli made for San Pietro di Muralto, a Dominican church in Camerino, a hill town in the Marche.

If Zeri was right, the paperwork for it survives. Crivelli first promised that altarpiece in 1483 to a local patron, Mariano Ronci, and in October 1488 he signed a new contract with Ronci's heir, who gave him one year and 100 florins, paid in instalments. On that reading the Pietà belongs to 1488 or 1489. The main panel of the altarpiece, the Virgin and Child with saints, is now in Berlin, and its smaller saints are divided between Berlin, Maastricht, Rome and Worcester in Massachusetts.

The lunette is about two metres wide. Around the dead Christ, Crivelli placed the Virgin, Saint John and Mary Magdalene, against a ground of gold.