Saint James the Great

Saint James the Great from 1472 at the Brooklyn Museum was part of a polyptych Crivelli painted for a Marchigian church. The apostle James, patron of pilgrims and the great shrine at Santiago de Compostela, is shown with his traditional attributes of pilgrim's staff and shell. Crivelli's polyptychs maintained the medieval multi-panel format long after Venetian painters had adopted the unified altarpiece. exiled from Venice, worked for Adriatic patrons in the Marche, developing a highly distinctive personal idiom.

The saint's figure stands against a gilded background with Crivelli's characteristically crisp outlines and volumetric drapery, the shell badge and staff rendered with the precise, almost goldsmith-like technique that defines his artistic personality.