_Carlo Crivelli_ (Venetian: painted 1468-1493). _See 602._
Gabriele Ferretti (to whose family Pope Pius IX. belonged) was Superior
of the Franciscans in the March of Ancona, and died in 1456. Thirty
years later his body was found incorrupt, and was deposited in a
sarcophagus in the church of S. Francesco ad Alto at Ancona. It is
conjectured that the present picture was painted for that church in
commemoration of the discovery of the body. The artist shows us the
holy man in enjoyment of the vision of the beatified. "The Beato (in
Franciscan habit) has been reading or praying, at the entrance of a
cave near a church, in a quiet country spot from which a road leads to
a town in the distance. Suddenly in the sky the Virgin and Child appear
(surrounded by the _Vesica_ glory, see No. 564). He has laid down his
book, put off his sandals, and kneels in prayer and adoration.... The
masterly treatment of the drapery, the perfection of the forms, the
architecture, the sense of spaciousness in the landscape, all point
to the maturity of Crivelli's art.... The landscape, for general
effect, is one of his best, though the treatment of the rocks and of
the foreground is still conventional. The most striking objects in
it are the leafless tree-stems, the counterpart, as it were, of the
hard and bony human figures of which he was so fond, and therefore
an illustration of his love for anatomical forms. His seeking after
realism again appears in the two ducks painted with minute precision.
In contrast to them we get the festoon of fruit at the top of the
picture, illustrating the conventional and decorative aspect of his
art. No picture of his suggests more completely both the range and the
limitations of Crivelli" (G. M. Rushforth: _Carlo Crivelli_, pp. 65,
87).