Virgen con el Niño

Carlo Crivelli trained in Venice but spent his working life in the Marche, the provincial towns down the Adriatic coast, and this small Madonna was made around 1470 for the Franciscan Observant church in Macerata. He never softened his style to the new fashion for hazy, atmospheric painting. Instead he kept a hard, jeweller's precision, every fold and hair drawn sharp against a ground of gold, and he loved to hang swags of lifelike fruit, apples and gourds, across the tops of his pictures. The panel was later lifted from its wooden support onto canvas to preserve it, and it hangs today in the civic gallery of the same town it was painted for.