You can study religious paintings from different perspectives, taking into consideration the message behind an artwork, its symbols and metaphors, or maybe look at the composition from a merely artistic point of view and focus on the colours, lights and shadows. But you can study certain paintings also from an architectural perspective. As Christmas is approaching, let's look at Carlo Crivelli's "The Annunciation with St Emidius" (1486).
Commissioned as an altarpiece for the Church of the Holy Annunciation in Ascoli Piceno, the painting placed the Annunciation in an everyday urban setting.
The Virgin Mary is praying in a small yet lavishly furnished room (we can see a shelf and a bed with an embroidered bedcover and pillows), when a ray of light symbolising the Holy Spirit descends upon her through an arched gap in the wall of her house. This opening in the wall is one of the key architectural elements of the painting: the closed passage - and the flask of pure water in Mary's bedroom - symbolise indeed her virginity. The doorway to Mary's house is flanked by highly ornate Corinthian pilasters that frame her.
Outside her window - another architectural element that maybe hints at the perspective grid used by painters that finds another correspondence in the coffered ceiling on the second floor of Mary's house - there are the archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she is to be the mother of Christ, and St Emidius, patron saint of Ascoli, carrying a model of the town he protects.
This is another architectural element connected with the history of the town, celebrating how in 1482, Pope Sixtus IV granted the city of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche "libertas ecclesiastica", that is the right to self-government free from direct papal rule (the grant reached Ascoli on the feast day of the Annunciation, a date and sacred event that thereafter assumed a central importance in the civic culture of the city).
Ascoli is also evoked by the urban setting in the background of the painting, that features a massive arcade in yellow marble (Crivelli probably learnt simulated marble architecture from Squarcione, or one of his pupils such as Giorgio Schiavone), a paved street, various openings and closures, and a variety of buildings (most of them plainer than Mary's house and mainly made of stone) populated by human figures that add to the painting a sense of dynamism.
The figures portrayed standing in the streets seem to be too busy discussing business to realise what's going on around them, but a child, a little girl, intently looks from a balustrade at the figures kneeling in front of Mary's house.
In the painting there is a gender juxtaposition between masculine and feminine spaces: while the angel and the saint are portrayed outside Mary's house, she is portrayed in a domestic environment that occupies most of the right side of the painting.
The viewer is also positioned in a privileged spot that allows them to gain the fullest understanding of the story: while Mary is protected by the privacy of her house and a wall and a window separate her from her visitors, the viewer can actually see inside it, meaning that she is accessible to the worshipper.
The details are also impressive from the geometric patterns on the two rugs in the background, to the the eyed tail of the peacock. The bird is symbolic: according to a superstitious belief its flesh never decayed, so the bird represents immortal life.
There are also other symbols such as the apple and gourd placed over the inscription in the foreground outside the house of the Virgin. The former stands for the original sin and human mortality, while the gourd packed with seeds like the pomegranate is a promise of resurrection and redemption.
Crivelli was an extraordinary craftsman, a fine technical painter and a brilliant colourist who often played with the idea of paintings as windows onto other worlds, at once suggesting and undermining illusionism. He became known for his works characterised by complex perspectives and including elegant and detailed decorative surfaces.
If you want to know more about this 15th century painter, you may have to wait until 2021: there will indeed be a major exhibition of Crivelli's masterpieces - "Carlo Crivelli. Radical Illusionism in the 15th Century" - at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery during the summer 2021. The event will highlight Crivelli's experimental use of single point perspective and trompe l'oeil to assert the coexistence of terrestrial and spiritual realities and will feature also "The Annunciation with St Emidius".
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