{"it":{"id":"NX-A14","name":"Crivelli, Annunciation with Saint Emidius","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","place":"National Gallery, London (museum location)","lat":51.50889,"lon":-0.12833,"date":"1486","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annunciation,_with_Saint_Emidius"},{"t":"Wikidata Q642198","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q642198"},{"t":"National Gallery, London collection page","u":"https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius"}],"tags":[],"nfacts":8,"coord_basis":"current holding institution: National Gallery","loc_note":"museum location","acc":"NG739","sum":"High in the sky a ring of cloud opens, and a flash of golden light runs down through a small hole in the wall to the Virgin Mary, kneeling in her room. In the street outside, the archangel Gabriel has been stopped by a bishop saint, Emidius, who balances a model of his town on his knee. Only a small child and a young man gazing upward seem to notice the light.\n\nCarlo Crivelli painted The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius in 1486 for the Observant Friars of Ascoli Piceno, a town ruled by the pope. Ascoli was granted a degree of self-government in 1482, and the news arrived on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation. The painting is egg tempera with some oil on canvas, 207 by 146.7 cm, and was presented to the National Gallery in London by Lord Taunton in 1864.\n\nWhat is hard to explain, for a modern viewer, is the ring itself. Cut out of its setting, it looks like a hovering object sending down a beam.\n\nThe National Gallery reads the scene in the terms of its time: the flash carries the dove of the Holy Ghost down from heaven to Mary. The historian Massimo Polidoro, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2018, asks whether the scene could be 'the chronicle of an alien abduction' and answers no: the object is 'a vortex of angels in the clouds', a frequent way to show God in medieval and Renaissance art. Theories of ancient astronauts, he writes, make the error of 'reinterpreting with the eyes of twenty-first-century Europeans the product of other cultures'.\n\nThe open question is how many old images we misread because we no longer know their symbols, and how we would ever find out.","nsrc":3,"new":1,"qs":["Crivelli painted a beam of light from a disc in the sky in 1486. Religious symbol, or did artists sometimes paint what people saw?","Polidoro says the UFO reading uses 21st-century eyes. Is he right, or are we too quick to dismiss what old paintings show?","If you saw this image without knowing it was an Annunciation, what would you think it showed?"],"why":"A famous painting whose sign of God can look like something else to modern eyes.","yt":"Compare other Annunciations.","rel":["UFO-ARN"],"hook":"A flash from a ring in the sky strikes the Virgin through a hole in the wall. Crivelli painted it in 1486."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"NX-A14","qs":["Crivelli painted a flash of light from a ring in the sky in 1486. Why do some old religious symbols look so modern to us?","Polidoro says modern readings use 21st-century eyes. Where else might we be misreading old art?","If you saw this image without knowing it was an Annunciation, what would you think it showed?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Crivelli_Carlo%2C_Annunciation.jpg/1280px-Crivelli_Carlo%2C_Annunciation.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crivelli_Carlo,_Annunciation.jpg","title":"Crivelli Carlo, Annunciation.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Carlo Crivelli","cap":"Photo of Crivelli, Annunciation with Saint Emidius","alt":"Photo of Crivelli, Annunciation with Saint Emidius"}],"ms":[{"a":"Size","v":"207 x 147 cm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annunciation,_with_Saint_Emidius"},{"a":"height (Wikidata)","v":"207 centimetre","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikidata Q642198","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q642198"},{"a":"width (Wikidata)","v":"147 centimetre","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikidata Q642198","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q642198"},{"a":"inventory (Wikidata)","v":"NG739","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikidata Q642198","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q642198"},{"a":"collection (Wikidata)","v":"National Gallery","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikidata Q642198","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q642198"},{"a":"Size (NG)","v":"207 x 146.7 cm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"National Gallery, London collection page","url":"https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius"},{"a":"Inventory (NG)","v":"NG739","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"National Gallery, London collection page","url":"https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius"},{"a":"Acquired (NG)","v":"Presented by Lord Taunton, 1864","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"National Gallery, London collection page","url":"https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius"}],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annunciation,_with_Saint_Emidius"},{"t":"Wikidata Q642198","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q642198"},{"t":"National Gallery, London collection page","u":"https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius"},{"id":"VNX-A14-4","t":"Skeptical Inquirer (2018): Does the Vatican hold a painting of a UFO?","u":"https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/does-the-vatican-hold-a-painting-of-a-ufo/"}],"sum":"From 1484 the town of Ascoli Piceno, in the Marches of central Italy, was struck by a plague so severe that many of its people fled and the great procession on the feast of the Annunciation had to be cancelled. The town was also at war with its old rival, Fermo. Two years later, in 1486, the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli signed and dated a large altarpiece for the friars of the town. It celebrated a political victory, and, according to the National Gallery in London, which now owns it, it was also an appeal for divine help. It is called The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, and for many people today the first thing they notice is a glowing ring in the sky.\n\nThe victory came in 1482. Ascoli was ruled by the pope, but that year Pope Sixtus IV granted it a degree of self-government, and the news reached the town on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, the day the angel Gabriel told Mary she would bear a child. From then on the feast was marked by a procession up to the convent of the Observant Friars, for whom the painting was made. Along the bottom run coats of arms, those of the pope, the town and its bishop according to the gallery, and the Latin words LIBERTAS ECCLESIASTICA, \"church liberty,\" the title of the papal bull that granted the town its rights.\n\nThe painting is a pala, an altarpiece with a single unified surface, unlike most of Crivelli's altarpieces, which were built from many panels with gold backgrounds. It is painted in egg tempera with some oil on canvas and measures 207 by 146.7 centimetres. The signature, OPVS CAROLI CRIVELLI VENETI 1486, sits on the pilasters by the door of Mary's house.\n\nThe story is told in a street. Gabriel, holding white lilies, has come down to deliver his message, but a bishop saint has stopped him. This is Saint Emidius, patron of Ascoli, who holds on his knee a model of the town whose towers can still be recognised today. The gallery calls the painting unique in showing a local saint effectively stepping into a biblical event. On the other side of a wall Mary kneels at a prayer desk in a splendid Renaissance palace, reading from a book believed to be the prophecy of Isaiah, about to receive the light that will make her the mother of God. Around them the town goes on as usual. People talk; a maid balances a pot on her head while spinning wool; mortar drips down a freshly repaired wall. A man on a bridge reads a message just delivered by a carrier pigeon, perhaps the news of the papal bull, in what the gallery calls a witty echo of the Annunciation itself.\n\nCrivelli filled the scene with symbols his viewers would have read easily. The goldfinch in its cage and the peacock stand for Christ's Passion and Resurrection. The lilies stand for Mary's purity, and so does the glass vase, because light passes through glass without breaking it, as Christ was conceived. The apple at the bottom of the picture stands for the fall of man, and the cucumber for the promise of redemption. Both fruits cast shadows on the painted shelf and also seem to cast them on the surface of the picture itself, a trick Crivelli enjoyed, making the painting look flat and three-dimensional at once. He set the vanishing point to the left rather than in the centre, so that he could show the inside of Mary's house beside a view down the narrow street.\n\nThen there is the sky. In the upper left a ring of cloud opens and a thin golden ray runs down from it, through a small golden hole in the wall, to Mary. Only a small child peering round the corner of the steps and a young man gazing upward have noticed it. The gallery explains that the flash carries the dove of the Holy Ghost from heaven to Mary, and that the wind of its passing has disturbed the doves on their perches and ruffled the oriental carpet hung over the wall.\n\nSeen without that background, the ring looks to some modern eyes like a hovering craft sending down a beam. In fringe theories, the circle in the sky has been claimed as a UFO. In 2018 the investigator Massimo Polidoro, a co-founder of the Italian skeptics' group, took up such claims in Skeptical Inquirer. Looking at Crivelli's painting closely, he wrote, the object in the sky is \"a vortex of angels in the clouds, another frequent representation of God in Medieval and Renaissance sacred works of art.\" Painters, he noted, drew on very precise biblical references and were expected to include symbols that were \"anything but random.\" The usual error of the ancient astronaut theories, he concluded, is \"reinterpreting with the eyes of twenty-first-century Europeans the product of other cultures.\"\n\nThe gallery's own reading supports him. Every detail in the painting has a place in the theology and politics of Ascoli in 1486: the bull, the saint, the procession, the pigeon, the fruit. The ring of cloud is where heaven opens, and the ray is the path of the Holy Spirit.\n\nYet the painting does raise a fair question about how quickly the meaning of an image is lost. The people of Ascoli read it at a glance. Five centuries later, many visitors need a label to tell them what a goldfinch, a cucumber or a glass vase is doing there. The same thing that turns a vortex of angels into a craft also makes it hard for us to know when an older, stranger image is showing something we no longer have words for.\n\nThe painting left Ascoli long ago. It was recorded in the church of the Santissima Annunziata in about 1724, moved to the Brera in Milan in 1811, exchanged with Count Auguste-Louis de Sivry in 1820, sold in London in 1847, and given to the National Gallery by Lord Taunton in 1864. It hangs there now in Room 59.\n\nStand in front of it and look up to the left: a disc of cloud ringed with tiny angels, a single golden thread falling from it across the rooftops and through a hole in the wall, and below, in the busy street, a small child peering round the steps and a young man with his face turned upward, the only two people in the whole town who have seen it."},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NX-A14.webp","w":1280,"h":1600,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Crivelli_Carlo%2C_Annunciation.jpg/1280px-Crivelli_Carlo%2C_Annunciation.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}