Il Sangue di Cristo

Crivelli painted this in tempera and gold late in his career, around 1490, working out in the Marches on Italy's Adriatic side. By then Florence had largely moved to oil paint and a softer naturalism, but Crivelli kept the hard, jewel-bright line and gold ground of an older devotional art, and his patrons around Ascoli loved him for it. The scene itself is unusual. Saint Francis kneels and catches in a chalice the blood streaming from the wound in Christ's side, surrounded by the tools of the Passion, the column, the ropes, the sponge on its reed. For a Franciscan viewer it tied their founder, who bore Christ's own wounds, directly to the Mass. The small panel was most likely once part of a larger altarpiece since taken apart.