Carlo Crivelli, 'The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius', 1486

The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius

Carlo Crivelli

Not on display

About the work

Overview

The Archangel Gabriel descends from God to tell the Virgin that she is to bear a child – a moment known as the Annunciation – but has been distracted from his mission by a bishop saint, who has stopped him in the street of a Renaissance town. This is Saint Emidius, patron saint of the town of Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marches. This painting is unique in showing a local saint effectively intervening in a biblical event.

Ascoli was ruled by the pope but was granted a degree of self-government in 1482. The news arrived on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation. From this time onward this feast was celebrated with a great procession to the convent of the Observant Friars, for whom this altarpiece was made.

The coats of arms along the base are those of the pope, the town and its bishop, while the inscription, ‘LIBERTAS ECCLESIASTICA’, was the title of the papal bull granting Ascoli its rights.

In-depth

The Archangel Gabriel descends from God to tell the Virgin Mary that she is to bear a child – a moment known as the Annunciation – but has been distracted from his mission by a bishop saint, who has stopped him in the street of a Renaissance town. This is Saint Emidius, patron saint of Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marches.

Ascoli was ruled by the pope but was granted a degree of self government in 1482. The news arrived on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation. From then on, the feast was celebrated with a great procession from the town up to the convent of the Observant Friars, for whom this altarpiece was made. The coats of arms along the base of the painting are those of the town, the pope and the bishop, while the inscription, ‘LIBERTAS ECCLESIASTICA’, was the title of the papal bull granting Ascoli its rights.

This painting is unique in showing a local saint effectively intervening in a biblical event. Emidius balances a model of Ascoli, whose towers are still recognisable today, on his knee. Just the other side of the wall we see Mary kneeling in a splendid Renaissance palace, about to be struck by a heavenly bolt of light which will transform her into the mother of God.

Around them the town goes on, oblivious. Only a small child peering round the corner of the steps and a young man gazing up at the sky have noticed the flash which carries the dove of the Holy Ghost down from heaven, through a convenient golden hole in the wall and to Mary. The wind of its passing has disturbed the doves, who flutter from their perches, and ruffled the oriental carpet hanging over the wall above Mary’s chamber. A man on the bridge reads a message handed to him by another man, perhaps the news of the papal bull. It has been delivered by the carrier pigeon in the cage beside them – a witty analogy of the Annunciation itself.

This is Crivelli’s best-known painting and a masterpiece of decoration and perspective. He’s combined classical architecture and Renaissance ornament with an interest in the depiction of everyday objects, similar to Netherlandish painting. Most of Crivelli’s altarpieces were polyptychs with gold backgrounds, but this is a pala, an altarpiece with a single, unified surface. This format allowed Crivelli to show both his mastery of linear perspective and his gift for descriptive detail.

The vanishing point is, unusually, located to the left rather than in the centre of the composition, so that Crivelli can put a close-up of the inside of Mary’s house next to a view down the narrow street beside it. Like many artists, Crivelli used ideas from other painters. Italian artists such as Mantegna were experimenting with radical perspective from the 1450s, and Crivelli probably took the idea for the composition of Gabriel in the street and the Virgin in her house from Giovanni Angelo d'Antonio’s Annunciation, made for the main church in Camerino in about 1455. But he’s transformed his model completely, so that the angel, the saint and the Virgin appear almost as if they were ordinary people going about their daily business. Objects and people cast shadows – the peacock, the fluttering carpets, even Emidius himself – adding to our sense of looking into a real space. In the background people chat, a maid balances a pot on her head and spins wool on a distaff, while mortar drips down a recently repaired wall.

Mary’s room is full of beautifully observed household objects which give the painting a non-religious feel. The books piled on the shelf above her bed are rotated at different angles to show off Crivelli’s trademark skill at foreshortening, while the candle and vase cast distinct shadows on the wooden panelling. Mary kneels at a prie-dieu (a prayer desk) and reads from a book whose pages flutter in the breeze – she was thought to have been reading Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of the Messiah at the moment of Gabriel’s arrival.

Mary herself is a fashionable fifteenth-century lady. She wears a tight bodice embroidered with gold flowers and foliage, and her linen underdress emerges in puffs from her slashed sleeves. Her head is bare, aside from a jewelled coronet, a reminder that she is both a virgin and Queen of Heaven: only unmarried girls and royalty had uncovered hair. Many of the details dotted around the painting had symbolic meaning at the time. The goldfinch in its cage and the peacock perched were symbols respectively of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, while the lily Gabriel holds refers to Mary’s chastity and spiritual purity. Even the glass vase was a metaphor for the mystery of Christ’s conception, as light passes through glass without fracturing it.

As well as commemorating their political and financial autonomy, the altarpiece was also an appeal for divine aid. The model city held by Emidius recalls miniature cities offered by communes in the Marche at the important shrine of the Virgin at Loreto, on the Adriatic coast north of Ascoli. From 1484 Ascoli was devastated by a plague so severe that the Annunciation Day procession had to be cancelled and many of the citizens fled. It also plunged into a war with its long-standing rival, the city of Fermo.

We see Crivelli’s signature and the date on the pilasters by the doorway into the Virgin’s house, while fruit – his trademark – balances precariously on the marble shelf at the bottom. Crivelli loved playing games with his viewers, suggesting that his paintings were both flat and three-dimensional. The fruit here casts shadows both on the shelf and on the surface of the painting, as do the fruit and flowers in The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele.

Key facts

Details

Full title: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius
Artist: Carlo Crivelli
Artist dates: about 1430/5 - about 1494
Date made: 1486
Medium and support: egg tempera with some oil on canvas
Dimensions: 207 × 146.7 cm
Inscription summary: Signed; Dated
Acquisition credit: Presented by Lord Taunton, 1864
Inventory number: NG739
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection
Frame: 19th-century English Frame

Provenance

Recorded ca. 1724 in the SS. Annunziata, Ascoli; the altar over which it had hung was at that time dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, and the picture had been transferred to the Capella domestica. Orsini (1790) mentions it in the Friary; it was removed to the Brera, Milan, in 1811. Exchanged with Count Auguste-Louis de Sivry, 1820. Edward Solly Sale, London, 8 May, 1847 (lot 35), bought by Graves. In the collection of the Rt. Hon. H. Labouchere (later Lord Taunton); exhibited at the British Institution, 1847 (No. 56); presented by Lord Taunton, 1864.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Martin Davies, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools’, London 1986; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2009

Carlo Crivelli a Brera

Pinacoteca di Brera

26 November 2009 - 28 March 2010
2012

Masterpieces from Museums of the World at the Hermitage

The State Hermitage Museum

14 February 2012 - 27 May 2012
2014

Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

The National Gallery (London)

30 April 2014 - 21 September 2014
2015

Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

22 October 2015 - 25 January 2016
2020

Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London

The National Museum of Western Art

18 June 2020 - 18 October 2020

The National Museum of Art

3 November 2020 - 31 January 2021
2021

Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London

National Gallery of Australia

5 March 2021 - 14 June 2021
2022

Carlo Crivelli. Shadows on the Sky

Ikon Gallery

23 February 2022 - 29 May 2022

Bibliography

1724

D.T. Lazzari, Ascoli in prospettiva: Colle sue più singolari pitture, sculture e architetture, Ascoli 1724
1766

F.A. Marcucci, Saggio delle cose ascolane e de'vescovi di Ascoli nel Piceno dalla fondazione della città sino… all'anno mille settecento sessanta sei, Teramo 1766
1790

B. Orsini, Descrizione delle pitture, sculture, architetture ed altre cose rare della insigne città di Ascoli nella Marca, Perugia 1790
1830

G. Cantalamessa-Carboni, Memorie intorno i letterati e gli artisti della città di Ascoli nel Piceno, Ascoli 1830
1834

A. Ricci, Memorie storiche delle arti e degli artisti della Marca di Ancona, Macerata 1834
1892

G. Frizzoni, La Galleria Morelli in Bergamo, Bergamo 1892
1900

G.M. Rushforth, Carlo Crivelli, London 1900
1900

C. Mariotti, 'Oggetti sacri d'argento esulati da Ascoli nel 1796', Rassegna bibliografica dell'arte italiana, III, 1900
1901

G. Carotti, Catalogo della R. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan 1901
1901

A. Venturi, Storia dell'arte italiana, 11 vols, Milan 1901
1901

G. Cantalamessa, 'Un dipinto di Carlo Crivelli nella Pinacoteca Vaticana', Rassegna d'arte, I, 1901, pp. 49-53
1907

C. Ricci, La Pinacoteca di Brera, Bergamo 1907
1907

L. Venturi, Le origini della pittura veneziana 1300-1500, Venice 1907
1909

B. Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, 3rd edn, New York 1909
1916

B. Berenson, Venetian Painting in America, New York 1916
1923

R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, 19 vols, The Hague 1923
1927

F. Drey, Carlo Crivelli und seine Schule, Munich 1927
1932

B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works, with an Index of Places, Oxford 1932
1936

B. Berenson, Pitture italiane del Rinascimento: Catalogo dei principali artisti e delle loro opere con un indice dei luoghi, Milan 1936
1937

F.J. Mather, Venetian Painters, London 1937
1946

R. Longhi, Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, Florence 1946
1947

M. Davies, Carlo Crivelli: The Annunciation, London 1947
1951

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools, London 1951
1952

P. Zampetti, Carlo Crivelli nelle Marche, Urbino 1952
1957

R. Pallucchini, La pittura veneta del Quattrocento, parte II: La diffusione del Mantegnismo nel Veneto dal Crivelli a Giovanni Bellini, Padua 1957
1961

A. Bovero, Tutta la pittura del Crivelli, Milan 1961
1961

P. Zampetti, Crivelli e i Crivelleschi (exh. cat. Palazzo Ducale (Venice), 10 June -10 October 1961), Venice 1961
1975

A. Bovero, L'opera completa del Crivelli, Milan 1975
1984

T. Zanobini Leoni, 'Carlo Crivelli: L'annunciazione della National Gallery di Londra', Critica d'arte, XLIX/2, 1984, pp. 93-6
1986

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools, revised edn, London 1986
1986

P. Zampetti, Carlo Crivelli, Florence 1986
1990

T. Lenain, 'Y-a-t-il une crise de la représentation dans la peinture classique?', Annales d'histoire de l'art et d'archéologie, XII, 1990, pp. 91-108
1991

J. Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, New Haven 1991
1992

K.H. Hofmann, Verkündigung mit St-Emidius von Carlo Crivelli: Eine geometrische Analyse, Darmstadt 1992
1993

R. White and J. Pilc, 'Analyses of Paint Media', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XIV, 1993, pp. 86-94
1995

E.H. Gombrich, Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 26 April - 18 June 1995), London 1995
1998

F. Gennari Santori, 'They will form such an Ornament for our Gallery: La National Gallery e la pittura di Carlo Crivelli', in A.C. Tommasi (ed.), Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle conoscitore e conservatore: Atti del convegno, Legnago, 28 novembre 1997-Verona, 29 novembre 1997, Venice 1998, pp. 291-312
1999

M. Massa (ed.), Il patrimonio disperso: Il 'caso' esemplare di Carlo Crivelli: Atti delle giornate di studio, Montefiore dell'Aso, Camerino, Porto San Giorgio, 12 ottobre, 26 ottobre, 9 novembre 1996, Ripatransone 1999
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
2001

S. Weigel, 'Die Richtung des Bildes: Zum Links-Rechts von Bilderzahlungen und Bildbeschreibungen in kultur- und mediengeschichtlicher Perspektive', Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, LXIV, 2001, pp. 449-74
2002

T. Golsenne, 'L'annonciation de Carlo Crivelli et le probleme de l'ornement', Studiolo, 1, 2002, pp. 149-76
2004

M. Feuillet, L'annonciation Sous Le Regard des Peintres, Marne 2004
2004

R. Lightbown, Carlo Crivelli, New Haven 2004
2004

J. Sander, Italienische Gemälde im Städel 1300-1550. Oberitalien, Marken und Rom, Mainz 2004

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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