Carlo Crivelli, 'La Madonna della Rondine (The Madonna of the Swallow)', after 1490

This large panel is the main part of an altarpiece painted by Carlo Crivelli in 1491 for the Ottoni family chapel in the Franciscan church at Matelica, in the Italian Marches. Its predella is also in our collection.

The Virgin, to whom the chapel was dedicated, sits on a marble throne and is crowned as the Queen of Heaven. The Christ Child on her knee holds an apple, symbolising the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden.  A swallow, the rondine of the painting’s title, is perched above the Virgin’s head. Because they reappeared every spring, swallows symbolised the Resurrection.

The saints on either side of her reflect the concerns of the patrons, one a churchman, the other a soldier. Saint Jerome, in his cardinal’s robes, carries the books of the Bible which he translated into Latin; on them, a model church balances precariously. Rays of light come from its open door, suggesting the light which Jerome’s writings cast on holy scripture. Opposite him is Saint Sebastian, dressed as a medieval knight, an arrow pinched delicately between his fingers. Sebastian was a Roman solider and a secret Christian. When his faith was discovered he was shot with arrows, but did not die.

Jerome looks intently at Christ and points at his model church, asking for Christ’s mercy on the Church. In response, Jesus points to his mother – a symbol of the Christian Church. Sebastian, in contrast, looks out at us: he personifies the Ottoni family’s ideal of the perfect Christian knight. In the Middle Ages Sebastian’s arrow wounds were related to the black swellings of bubonic plague, which ravaged Western Europe from the mid-fourteenth century. Here, his down-turned arrow symbolises his role as protector from the disease, which had hit Matelica in the 1480s.

With clothing, then as now, indicating social position, the Virgin is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century Italian fashion. Her sleeves are made of brocaded cloth of gold, laced at wrist and elbow, slashed to reveal her linen shift. People who lived in Matelica would have been especially interested in luxury fabrics, as the town was a centre of textile manufacture and the Ottonis themselves owned wool, silk and dye workshops.

Crivelli himself was fascinated by decorative textiles – they appear in many of his paintings, like The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian – and the Virgin, her throne and even the back wall are draped in rich silk. He was an economical artist, though: look closely and you can see that he has used the same design for both the silks draped over the back wall, and that the cloth of honour is repeated in Saint Sebastian’s sleeve. Like earlier Italian artists such as Fra Angelico, Crivelli clearly had a stock of designs, probably drawings, which he recycled and reworked, creating an impression of variety by giving them different textures and colouring and changing their scale. Here, the two silks hanging on either side of the throne show different portions of the same design and are in different colours, making the repetition less obvious.