![]() ![]() Often, his art included such peculiarities as setting a figure represented within a frame of cracked masonry, or incorporating the strategic placement of fruit or vegetables, including what is either a girthy cucumber or a gourd. He worked in a style that was Gothic and mannered, with an idiosyncratic use of trompe-l’oeil. ![]() According to the National Gallery of Art, both his father and his brother were painters. Crivelli was born in Venice in the forteen-thirties. Although Crivelli was mentioned, and indeed praised-“He takes rank with the most genuine artists of all times and countries, and does not weary even when ‘great masters’ grow tedious,” Berenson wrote-he was dispensed within a few lines, whereas Titian, Tintoretto, Giovanni Bellini, and others were granted pages of attention. Yet when it came to writing “Italian Painters of the Renaissance,” Berenson’s influential survey from 1930, he more or less wrote Crivelli out of art history. The painting, Berenson wrote, was “a picture which at the bottom of my heart I prefer to every Titian, every Holbein, every Giorgione.” The saint’s gilded armor and halo had been built up with the delicate application of gesso pastiglia, or paste-work, atop which the artist had layered paint and gold leaf, creating a glimmering, three-dimensional relief. The work, which measured thirty-seven by nineteen inches, and had once been part of a larger altarpiece, was exquisitely rendered. “You never in your life have seen anything so beautiful for color, and in line it is drawn as if by lightning,” Berenson wrote to Gardner, from Fiesole. George on horseback slaying a dragon, by the fifteenth-century Italian painter Carlo Crivelli. When Bernard Berenson, the art historian and tastemaker, was advising Isabella Stewart Gardner on acquisitions for her collection, in 1897, he urged her to purchase a small panel that depicted St. ![]()
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