Crivelli, Carlo (c. 1435–c. 1495)

Italian painter in the early Renaissance style. He was active in Venice and painted extremely detailed, decorated religious works, often festooned with garlands of fruit. The Annunciation (1486; National Gallery, London) is his best-known work.

His work, linear and wiry in style and full of rich and sometimes bizarre details, is highly personal and is outside the mainstream of art in Venice. He painted only religious subjects and, until the 1480s, employed the then outmoded device of raised plaster details in his work, which shows exquisite and sumptuous colour and decorative effects.

The National Gallery, London, has the finest collection of his work, including the richly embellished Demidoff altarpiece and the magnificent Annunciation. In addition to its formal splendour the latter includes a famous detail, the little girl peeping round a doorway, depicted with sympathetic humour.

He seems to have left Venice under a cloud after 1457 and thereafter worked mainly at Ascoli Piceno. He was knighted by Ferdinand II of Naples in 1490, after that date adding to his signature, ‘Carolus Crivellus Venetus’, the title ‘Miles’ (‘knight’).

Vittorio Crivelli was possibly a younger brother and painted in a similar style.