When you think about Renaissance art, your mind will likely turn to the classicizing, naturalistic works of artists like Giotto, Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. This bias towards the Florentine and Roman artists (either by birth or by career choice) traces back all the way to Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists from 1550 is dominated by Tuscan painters. However, the artists we typically associate with the Renaissance represent just one style that flourished during the early modern period in Italy.
Carlo Crivelli represents another school: the late Gothic. Born in Venice in 1430, Crivelli’s early career remains obscure. He likely studied under Gothic painters Jacobelo del Fiore and the Vivarini family. Later, Crivelli would study under Francesco Squarcione, who was also a teacher of Andrea Mantegna, though Crivelli and Mantegna could not have been more different as painters.
Crivelli’s characteristic style has been described as International Gothic. Unlike the Tuscan school, Crivelli made no surviving paintings of secular subject matter such as portraits or neoclassical subject matter. The majority of those paintings that survive are segments of altarpieces and devotional paintings. Many of his altarpieces maintain the punched and tooled gold backgrounds of the Gothic period, which by this time was a…
