Not just a Fruit Fetish – the Weird and Wonderful World of Carlo Crivelli at Ikon, Birmingham (until 29 May 2022)

 

St Catherine of Alexandria, c.1491-4, National Gallery London

There are cracks everywhere in Carlo Crivelli’s works; beautifully rendered trompe l’oeil fissures in rocks, masonry, even the earth itself. Perhaps he was just recording the reality of life in Italy’s earthquake-prone Marche. Perhaps they are symbolic of worldly imperfection like the oversized fly that is plaguing his St Catherine of Alexandria (c.1490s). Ironically, they also foretell his own fate, for Crivelli slipped through the cracks of art history, ignored by Vasari in his famous Lives, and side-lined ever since. Ikon Gallery’s small but jewel-like exhibition aims to redress the balance. Director Jonathan Watkins is a self-confessed Crivelli fan, who, thanks to generous loans from the National Gallery and a £150,000 grant from the Ampersand Foundation has created ‘Shadows on the Sky’, an exhibition as weird and wonderful as Crivellis it shows. Relieved of Renaissance context, exhibited like a contemporary artist on spacious white walls and placed in conversation with a Susan Collis installation, Crivelli is revealed, not as a conservative dead-end, but as playfully, cleverly experimental.

The show positions him as a 15th century Magritte and there’s plenty of surrealism in his work, not just the tromp l’oeil, but perspectival exaggerations, inexplicable shifts of scale, gravity-defying bowls and, yes, his famous oversized fruit. Whilst Tate Modern is exploring ‘Surrealism beyond borders’, this show reminds us that the tropes of the movement also extend beyond time. Crivelli might be exploring the souls of his viewers rather than revealing the secrets of his own psyche, but his art still has the power to make us question reality and rationality. In The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele (c. 1489) a swag of fruit, scaled to the viewer, ‘hangs’ from an implied frame. So far, so familiar: a typical early Renaissance exploration of Alberti’s theory of painting as a window. But Crivelli goes one better. The fruit casts a shadow on the sky of an otherwise naturalistic landscape; the artist undermines his own illusion. The friar’s vision, too, is a solidly rendered foreshortened pendant, from which the Virgin and Child thrust forward almost as if they’ve forced themselves through this painted world from a more real one beyond.

The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, c.1489, National Gallery, London

But Crivelli is not just about oddness. As his Victorian enthusiasts appreciated, he was lover of craftsmanship whose paintings zing with colour, detail, texture. His Venetian roots ran deep: he never abandoned Byzantine gold and followed Vivarini in exploiting three-dimensional pastiglia. You can only imagine how the panels would look glinting in candlelight, shining through incense filled gloom. He relishes rich damasks, intricate rugs, the precision of a peacock’s tail, a carnation, a glinting pearl. Detail piles on detail, a surfeit of visual sensation which creates a better than, fuller than, more beautiful than life, world; a visual heaven to which the faithful aspire and which the saints already inhabit. There’s an International Gothic eye for elongated line: Byzantine fingers pluck at serpentine folds, immaculate curls frame alabaster-skin faces. But Crivelli is no head in the sand has-been; he has Mantegna’s love of classical decoration and overhyped perspective.

St Roch, c.1480, Wallace Collection London

Britain is blessed with Crivellis, thanks mainly to a buying spree by the National Gallery in the 1860s, and he was a prolific artist. The small, sparse show in Birmingham gives the opposite impression. You can take your time and get up close in a way which their normal hang in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery doesn’t allow; and the vast, glorious, jaw-dropping Annunciation with St Emidius (1486) is hung so low you could almost walk into it. Take time to get to know Saint Roch (c.1480), normally relegated to a dark corner of the Wallace Collection. With careful tempera hatching, Crivelli creates detail and character: the hollowed cheeks and drawn skin, the plain pilgrim’s grab and yet underlying breeding and elegance; the hand raised in surprise and wonder as he reveals plague wound from which he has been cured. But these works were never intended be seen in splendid isolation. Most are hacked up altarpieces, meant to be crammed together between elaborate gilt, figures interacting, jostling for attention in competitive martyrdom. Their religious intensity, already dimmed by a secular world, is further reduced by the clinical setting. It’s a small quibble. Crivelli is a joy, and Birmingham, at present suffering the prolonged closure of its art gallery, is enjoying his presence.