The Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels

This panel is only 17 centimetres high, not much bigger than a postcard, and it was made to be held close rather than seen from across a church. Crivelli painted the same subject large, as the crowning panel of his altarpieces. Here the dead Christ and the two child angels holding him up over the tomb would fit between a pair of hands. The Louvre dates it to 1477.

How it came to Paris is the story of a collector's fall. The Marquis Giampietro Campana ran the papal pawnbroking bank in Rome and used its money to build one of the largest private collections of the 19th century. He was arrested in 1857 and his possessions were confiscated. In 1861 Napoleon the Third bought most of them from the papal government, thousands of antiquities along with a large group of early Italian paintings, and this small Crivelli travelled with them. It entered the Louvre in 1863, where the first catalogue listed it cautiously as attributed to Crivelli.