Joe Sheridan's Rustic Arts

08/11/2025

Save the Date! The 54th annual Fall Foliage Festival Art Show is coming October 11 and 12. On the streets of downtown Waynesboro!

06/26/2025

04/10/2025

Plus thousands of central Virginians participate in rallies protesting President Trump

04/10/2025

Joan Mitchel

04/10/2025

Carlo Crivelli - Annunciation of Ascoli (detail) - 1486 - National Gallery, London (tempera on panel transferred to canvas cm 207×146 cm)

Crivelli's Annunciation is a wonderful work preserved at the National -Gallery in London. Initially placed in Ascoli, the city for which the painting was conceived, it was transported by Napoleonic emissaries to Brera.

The Milanese art gallery preserves a significant number of works by Crivelli (collected in one of the most beautiful rooms of the museum) but this one in particular was badly sold, perhaps because the panel support was in poor condition or because Crivelli enjoyed little credit at the time. The painting finally landed in London where the painter was instead looked upon with great interest, in particular by the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

The striking aspect of this work of considerable size and excellent state of conservation of the color, is the fact that it combines the rationality of the early Renaissance, namely the exact perspective in the bold monumental composition, with an exuberant late Gothic decorative sense.

Crivelli's painting can therefore be enjoyed both by observing it as a whole, noting the unity of the composition subject to the rules of perspective, and starting from the individual details that offer themselves as excellent autonomous pieces.

The scene shows us the moment of the Annunciation. The Archangel Gabriel is kneeling and next to him is the patron saint of Ascoli, Saint Emidio who holds a model of the city with "one hundred towers" that on the very day of the Annunciation obtained administrative autonomy from the Papal State.

In a small study, kneeling in front of the lectern, we find the Virgin who is reached by a ray of divine light that accompanies the flight of the dove.
The entire painting is a riot of decorations and details that I invite you to discover.