They are more real than the Virgin and Child: real enough to touch, to taste, it almost seems. Across the top of the Vatican picture is a swag of apples, pears and shiny olives, with no symbolic purpose at all, apparently just there because he liked painting them. His sly sense of humour delights in undermining his own purportedly religious works. And that’s the way Crivelli would have wanted it, you feel. This show does have a proper catalogue but everything else about it stands the conventions of old-master shows upside down. You don’t expect to see an art installation that flirts with chaos in the middle of a Renaissance exhibition. Virgin and Child (ca 1480), Carlo Crivelli.
Oikon birmingham crack#
His Virgin and Child with a kneeling Franciscan friar, lent by the Vatican Pinacoteca, no less, on the other side of the same wall, has a brilliantly realistic crack painted into the marble on which the Virgin rests her feet, a dark rotting bloom of entropy. It’s a good joke because Crivelli himself is a whiz with trompe l’oeil. She has also made the brush, whose little encrustations of muck are precious stones, and the sheet and coat whose stains are embroidered. I watched her draw the crack in just two strokes with a steady hand and eye that might have impressed Crivelli himself. This is a witty bit of trompe l’oeil by artist Susan Collis. The museums that have lent their treasures can relax.
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But is it really safe to hang Renaissance masterpieces by the 15th-century artist Carlo Crivelli in a space that’s in this much disarray? They’ve left a brush, a dustsheet and paint-spattered blue overalls while they get lunch. Luckily, some workers are on the job fixing it.
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T here’s a crack from floor to ceiling in Birmingham’s Ikon gallery.