Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online lecture from Richard Stemp on the 15th century artists, Carlo Crivelli. Stemp based his talk on an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham which I had hoped to get to but ran out of time. I’ve always been fascinated by Crivelli as the National Gallery have a lot of his rather strange pictures and years ago I did a study morning with the speaker on the large Annunciation painting which overran and was great fun. Stemp talked about how Crivelli balances reality and illusionism in his work to delineate real and visionary space. There were details in the pictures which I’d never questioned with a modern eye as we are now used to surrealism but I now realise how unusual these details were at the time and the reasons behind them. The Ikon is usually a contemporary art gallery but put on this show due to an Ampersand Grant which allows a curator to put on their dream exhibition. The speaker took us through the beautiful contemporary responses to the work which a...

Fun online talk from the National Gallery looking at predella panels in the gallery from three altarpieces. Marc Woodhead and Carlo Corsato did an excellent double act talking us through what a predella was, the base of an altarpiece which was usually decorated with small scenes to illuminate lives of the saints or stories told in the main section of the work. They started by looking at Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna of the Swallow from 1490-92. The National Gallery has the whole altarpiece, including it’s frame, so it was a good way to show us how the predella worked. They took us through two panels in particular, the St George and the St Jerome, to show us how they told a whole story in a small picture. They even told us a story about St Jerome’s lion and a donkey that I’d never heard before! They then moved on to two pictures where the gallery only has panel from the predella and not the full work using them to show how altarpieces have been broken up over the years. They looked at...

Excellent morning’s workshop at the National Gallery led by Dr Richard Stemp looking in detail at the gallery’s Annunciation by Crivelli. We began by talking about who Crivelli was and where he was working then spent a nice long time at the picture looking at it in detail and talking about its meaning as we spotted things in it. The session had a feeling of discovery about it rather than following a set lecture type pattern. I was fascinated with why certain anachronistic items such as the gourd and apple seemed to come out of the painting towards you. It was also interesting to hear why the painting was produced and what it celebrated. I have always been fond of this picture with its odd mix of a real scene and city but with a mystical event happening in the middle of it. The morning made me look at it afresh and with the added knowledge to inform my viewing.