1 – Carlo Crivelli and his Contemporaries: An Alternative History of Italian Renaissance Painting
Online
Course 1 – Summer School online
Dr Amanda Hilliam
£395
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this course will now take place from Monday 15 to Friday 19 September 2025. Booking will open shortly: if you would like to reserve a place, please email short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk using the subject line ‘Reserve Crivelli.’
Course description
Lauded by the artist Audrey Flack as a “Gothic, Baroque Super-Realist” in 1981, the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli (c.1430-95) resists straightforward categorisation. His paintings merge traditional techniques such as the gold ground with witty effects of pictorial illusion, and as such possess both ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ characteristics. It therefore comes as little surprise that art historians since Vasari have neglected and misinterpreted his work. However, Crivelli is now witnessing a moment of recognition: a series of recent exhibitions and publications have shed new light on this most daring and technically skilled Venetian painter.
This course takes a broad view of Crivelli’s work. We shall examine his artistic origins in the Veneto and the reasons for his great success in the Marches on the Adriatic coast. The course explores his work in relation to that of his contemporaries, including Mantegna and Cosimo Tura, and considers his innovative responses to the devotional needs of his patrons, who were largely Franciscan and Dominican friars. Finally, paying close attention to the physical qualities of the paintings themselves, we shall ask what makes Crivelli’s work distinctive. His intelligent use of ornament and play on spatial dimensions deliberately counter naturalism, forcing us to reconsider existing narratives of fifteenth-century Italian art and to map out a wider context for Crivelli and his contemporaries.
Lecturer's biography
Dr Amanda Hilliam is Associate Lecturer in History of Art at the University of York. Previously, she taught at The Courtauld and was co-curator of the exhibition Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky at Ikon Gallery, organised in partnership with the National Gallery, London (2022). She held a predoctoral position in the Old Master Prints and Drawings department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (2018/19) and was the David and Julie Tobey Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2021). In 2023/4 she was the Rush H Kress Fellow at I Tatti.