Richard's Art Noticeboard: Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky - Ikon Gallery (23 February

Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation with Saint Emidius (1486)

Generally, I support the Northern Renaissance team (Dürer, Eyck, Grunewald, Holbein) rather than the Italian team (Botticelli, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Raphael.) I prefer the former’s realism, sometimes dark, sometimes visceral, to the latter’s sunny myth and fantasy. (I generalize, of course.) However, I make an exception for Carlo Crivelli whose individualistic weirdness is, I think, wonderful. And, thrillingly, the Ikon gallery has mounted a rare exhibition devoted to him.

I fell in love with Crivelli in 1973/4 when, as a first-year student of Art History at polytechnic, I made a study of Crivelli’s “Annunciation with St Emidius” (1486) in The National Gallery. This huge and fabulous painting is included in the Ikon show. It is a tour de force demonstration of Crivelli’s technical brilliance – his mastery of perspective and spatial illusion and representation of rich decorative detail – and it is cleverly layered with witty narrative details; for example, the mirroring of the Holy dove’s descent upon the Virgin Mary with the arrival by carrier pigeon of news to the city.

The other works in the show are smaller, but typically combine stunning realism – fruit you want to pluck, a fly you want to swat away – with elaborate artifice; crowns and haloes are executed in ‘pastiglia’, low relief decoration built up with gesso and coated in gold leaf. Then there is Crivelli’s idiosyncratic, figurative weirdness: those heavy-lidded eyes, those impossibly long and bony fingers and toes; the hairdos! I especially loved, in this show, “Saint Mary Magdalene” (c1491-4): as the exhibition guide puts it, she is “at once, seductress and saint”, and looks at us with a sly, sidelong gaze.

However, the babies (“Virgin and Child” (1480 & 1482), are something else! Scary.

A wonderful show.

Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky was at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, until 29 May 2022