In all these pictures Crivelli reveals himself as an artist filled with emotional inspiration, to whom the thrill of life is more than its trappings, and one, moreover, who observes, balances and differentiates. The society of his saints and angels is stimulating; the element of the unexpected enters into his work in open defiance of his pronounced mannerism. It is possible to detect beneath the close and manifold coverings of his ornate decoration a swift flame of imaginative impulse such as Blake sent into the world without such covering. He would have pleased Blake by this nervous energy and by his pure bright coloring, despite the fact that he signed himself "Venetus." He painted in tempera and finished his work with care and deliberation. It is remarkable that so little of his mental fire died out in the slow process of his execution. It is still more remarkable that in spite of his reactionary tendencies, his archaistic use of gold and relief at a moment when all great artists were renouncing these, he is intensely modern in his sentiment. He seems to represent a phase of human development at which we in America have but recently arrived; a phase in which appreciation of ancient finished forms of beauty is united to a restless eagerness and the impulse toward exaggerated self-expression. He is supposed to have been born about 1440, which would make him a contemporary of the two Bellini, of Hans Memling and of Mantegna. Had he only been able to give his imagination a higher range—had he possessed a more controlling spiritual ideal, had the touch of self-consciousness that rests like a grimace on the otherwise lovely aspect of much of his painting, been eliminated, he would have stood with these on the heights of fifteenth century art. We are fortunate to have in America the Boston Museum Pietà, which shows him in one of his most temperate moods, the Pietà of Mr. Johnson's collection, which is the emphatic expression of his least restrained moments, the St. George of Mrs. Gardiner's collection, in which his grasp of knightly character and pictorial grace is at its best, and these two strongly contrasted types of the Metropolitan Museum.
