Pieta by Carlo Crivelli in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2020

Pietà
1476


Object Details

Artist: Carlo Crivelli (Italian, Venice (?), active by 1457–died 1494/95 Ascoli Piceno)

Date: 1476

Medium: Tempera on wood, gold ground

Dimensions: Overall 28 1/4 x 25 3/8 in. (71.8 x 64.5 cm); painted surface 28 x 25 1/8 in. (71.1 x 63.8 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913

Accession Number: 13.178


Remarkable for its expressive intensity, this image of the Pietà belonged to an elaborate Gothic altarpiece widely considered Crivelli's masterpiece (National Gallery, London). Crivelli contrasts ornamental effects with details of extreme realism (or surrealism)—such as the hand with swollen wound and pronounced veins that hangs over the tomb’s edge into the viewer’s space. In the seventeenth century the picture belonged to the Barberini family in Rome: the frame is decorated with their emblem, the bee.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436053