San Lorenzo

In 1457 a Venetian court sentenced the young painter Carlo Crivelli to six months in prison for adultery. He had kept a sailor's wife hidden in his house for months. He left Venice soon after, worked for a time in Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, and by 1468 had crossed to the Marche, the hilly region of central Italy where he spent the rest of his career.

The first proof of his arrival is in this hilltop village, in the parish church of Saints Lawrence, Sylvester and Ruffinus. It is a polyptych signed "Karolus Crivellus Venetus" and dated 1468, his earliest surviving dated work. He went on calling himself Venetian for decades after he left. The Madonna and Child sit at the centre, flanked by John the Baptist, Lawrence with his gridiron, Sylvester and Francis, with the Annunciation and a Pietà above and four small Passion scenes along the base.

The original frame is lost, and the panels travelled for a time, to the town hall and then to the national gallery in Urbino, before coming back to the church after the Second World War. The same church also keeps a Madonna with angels by his brother Vittore Crivelli, who likewise settled in the Marche.