Ornament & Illusion

Ornament & Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice, edited by Stephen J Campbell, 215 pages

Although, as the subtitle indicates, Carlo Crivelli was Venetian, he spent most of his career in the Marches, the semi-independent cities and towns on the Adriatic side of the Papal States.  Working outside the main centers of Italian art and culture, he was overlooked by Vasari, and despite acquiring fame in the late nineteenth century, critics of the twentieth tended to dismiss him as backward-looking and provincial.  The bulk of Ornament & Illusion is an argument against that conclusion.

It is readily apparent that Crivelli was a master equally adept at rendering the gorgeous and the grotesque.  The essays included here further explicate the ways in which his work combined the original and the traditional for deliberate affect, particularly his use of ornamentation to create a sense of interaction between the image and the viewer.