La Vierge à l'Enfant

Look at the fly. Crivelli painted it near the front of this small devotional panel around 1480, so convincingly that viewers have reached to brush it off. It is a joke and a warning at once. In the language of the time a fly stood for sin and decay, and it sits in a picture full of such signs, the apple by the child for the fall of man, a cucumber and a goldfinch for the promise of rescue and the human soul. Crivelli was a Venetian who spent his career in the hill towns of the Marche, and he never lost his taste for hard, jewel-bright surfaces. The brocade, the marble ledge, the fruit, all carry the same unblinking sharpness that makes that painted fly so easy to believe.