e despair.

CARLO CRIVELLI

VI

CARLO CRIVELLI

Among the more interesting pictures acquired by the Metropolitan Museum
within the past two years are the panels by Carlo Crivelli, representing
respectively St. George and St. Dominic.

Crivelli is one of the fifteenth century Italian masters who show their
temperament in their work with extraordinary clearness. His spirit was
ardent and his moods were varying. With far less technical skill than
his contemporary, Mantegna, he has at once a warmer and more brilliant
style and a more modern feeling for natural and significant gesture. His
earliest known work that bears a date is the altar-piece in S. Silvestro
at Massa near Fermo; but his most recent biographer, Mr. Rushworth,
gives to his Venetian period before he left for the Marches, the Virgin
and Child now at Verona, and sees in this the strongest evidences of his
connection with the School of Padua. Other important pictures by him are
at Ascoli, in the Lateran Gallery, Rome, in the Vatican, in the Brera
Gallery at Milan, in the Berlin Gallery, in the National Gallery at
London, in Frankfurt (the Staedel Gallery), in the Museum of Brussels, in
Lord Northbrook's collection, London, in the Boston Museum, in Mrs.
Gardiner's collection at Boston, and in Mr. Johnson's collection at
Philadelphia. The eight examples in the National Gallery, although
belonging for the most part to his later period, show his wide range and
his predominating characteristics, which indeed are stamped with such
emphasis upon each of his works that despite the many and great
differences in these, there seems to be little difficulty in recognizing
their authorship. No. 788, _The Madonna and Child Enthroned, surrounded
by Saints_, an altarpiece painted for the Dominican Church at Ascoli in
1476, is the most elaborate and pretentious of the National Gallery
compositions, but fails as a whole to give that impression of moral and
physical energy, of intense feeling expressed with serene art, which
renders the _Annunciation_ (No. 739) both impressive and ingratiating.
The lower central compartment is instinct with grace and tenderness. The
Virgin, mild-faced and melancholy, is seated on a marble throne. The
Child held on her arm, droops his head, heavy with sleep, upon her arm
in a babyish and appealing attitude curiously opposed to the dignity of
the Child in Mantegna's group which hangs on the opposite wall. His hand
clasps his moth