Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the work of Carlo Crivelli and the geographical region he inhabited, which is here defined as that comprising the Adriatic Sea and its surrounding coastlines. Proposed as a useful unit of analysis by several art historians in recent years, this geographical framing helps to rethink Crivelli's work in terms other than centre-periphery paradigms which tend to sideline it. Through a close reading of the predella of his 1491 altarpiece La Madonna della Rondine, today housed in The National Gallery, London, the article proposes that Crivelli’s imagination of the wider Mediterranean was deeply engaged with the immediate concerns of the Adriatic. Through his representation of the land, sea, sky and human figures both familiar and ‘other’, Crivelli plots a kind of imaginative journey through the Mediterranean, incorporating a meta-narrative of religious conversion. Framed in terms of the Adriatic, Crivelli’s representation of different geographies applies pressure to historiographical traditions that understand the region as a boundary between East and West, instead suggesting that it was an area of considerable cultural exchange. 

Keywords: Adriatic, landscape, seascape, Crivelli, exchange