The Dead Christ supported by Two Angels

This arched panel was the top of an altarpiece Crivelli painted in the early 1470s for the Franciscan church at Montefiore dell'Aso, a hill town near Fermo in the Marche. Beneath it stood the Virgin with the Christ Child, so a worshipper's eye rose from the baby on his mother's lap to the same body dead. The two angels holding him up are children themselves, pink-cheeked and plump. One leans its head against his, the other looks up into his face. Against them Crivelli sets the grey, hollowed features of the dead man, and he records everything precisely, the thorns, the nail wound in the hand, the gash in the side. The altarpiece was taken apart in the Napoleonic years. This piece surfaced in a Roman collection in 1858, and the Gallery bought it the following year.