Carlo Crivelli

Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430–c. 1495) was born in Venice into a family of painters and trained there and in Padua, where he is believed to have worked in the workshop of Francesco Squarcione. After a prison sentence in 1457 for an affair with a married woman he left for Zadar in Dalmatia, and he spent most of his later career in the March of Ancona, especially in and around Ascoli Piceno, though he went on signing himself as a Venetian. His art is entirely religious, much of it commissioned by the Franciscans and Dominicans of Ascoli: Madonnas, Pietàs and polyptychs painted in tempera on panel at a time when oil was gaining ground. He kept a Late Gothic taste for punched gold grounds, hung his scenes with festoons of fruit and flowers, and modelled jewels and armour in raised gesso on the panel. Vasari ignored him, and he was revived in Britain in the Pre-Raphaelite era, when Burne-Jones among others admired his work. Here: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, possibly the best known of all his paintings.