Saint Stephen

Carlo Crivelli's Saint Stephen from 1476 belongs to the Demidoff Altarpiece or a related polyptych from the painter's mature Marchigian period, when he was producing a succession of multi-panel altarpieces for churches in the Marche region. Crivelli had been exiled from Venice in the 1450s following a criminal conviction and had resettled in the Adriatic territories, where he built a prolific career as the leading painter of the area. Stephen — the first Christian martyr, stoned to death and consequently shown holding stones and wearing a deacon's dalmatic — appears in Crivelli's treatment with the elaborate decorative embellishment that was the artist's signature: gold embroidery on the dalmatic executed with extraordinary illusionistic detail, the figure set against Crivelli's characteristic grisaille marbling and decorative pilasters.

Crivelli's application of gold and painted textile detail reaches exceptional density in the dalmatic: individual embroidered motifs — flowers, geometric patterns — are rendered as independent micro-paintings in miniature within the larger composition. The stones in the saint's hands are described with careful weight and three-dimensionality. The flesh modelling, unusually warm for Crivelli, uses fine brush hatch lines to build tone.