Museums at Work
Crivelli’s gold
Room XVII, Pinacoteca
“Crivelli’s gold” is the title of the exhibition devoted to the early Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli, with which the Vatican Museums intend to participate in the celebrations in honour of the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the United States of America.
The exhibition, which will open to visitors to the Pope’s Museums on 14 November, is an integral part of the museum itinerary – it is located in the Vatican Pinacoteca, in the spaces of Room XVII which has for more than two years hosted the Museums at Work cultural initiatives, to great public acclaim.
The focus of the exhibition will be the significant collection of works, preserved by the Vatican Museums, by the great Venetian artist, active in Dalmatia, the hinterland of the Veneto region and the Marches, in the period from 1463 to 1494, the year of his death in Ascoli Piceno.
Known for the exquisite elegance of his stylistic and representational inventions, Carlo Crivelli is distinguished by the extreme originality of the language he developed, in which the Renaissance conquests of perspective and the crisp modelling of the volumes link to decorative cadences and the use of gold in the late Gothic style.
In an unusually close comparison, the three masterpieces recently restored in the Vatican Museum Workshops thanks to the generous support of the American benefactors Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums are therefore on display: the five-panel polyptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints (1481), the Madonna and Child (1482), perhaps the central element of a dismembered polyptych, and the splendid lunette of the Pietà (1488-1489).
All three panels have benefited, albeit at different times, not only from careful restoration but also from sophisticated diagnostic investigations that have opened the way to new interpretations and previously unimaginable critical perspectives.