Madonna col Bambino

Crivelli signed and dated this panel in 1472. It was the centre of an altarpiece for a Dominican church in Ascoli Piceno, a hill town in the Marches far from the great centres, where this Venetian-trained painter spent most of his career and where local patrons loved his hard, jewel-bright precision. The Virgin sits on a marble throne, its dais cracked with a fine split he liked to include. On the ledge he has set two pears, an old sign of the Fall, and a single fly, painted so sharply, with its own little shadow, that it seems to have landed on the picture itself. Crivelli enjoyed such tricks of the eye, and kept working in tempera and gold long after fashion had moved on to oil.