Crivelli’s[72] fame was great but provincial. Originally most of his altar-pieces adorned churches of the Adriatic Marches. Dozens have passed thence to the museums of Europe and America. One and all they seem less painted things than the most splendid of mineral productions. It is incredible that mere brush and paint can achieve so tense a line and such jewel-like surfaces. Entirely typical is an early Madonna, at Verona, Figure 214. The great ancona of 1476 in the National Gallery shows him faithful to the arrangements of the early Venetians. The Annunciation, in the same gallery, painted ten years later, reveals him affected by the narrative tradition of Jacopo Bellini. In America fine Pietàs at Boston, Figure 215, New York, and in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, exemplify his rectitude and energy. While Mrs. Gardner’s St. George and the Dragon, as the most fastidious of fairy tales, consoles us for the absence of this subject among the few pictures of Jacopo Bellini. From his beginnings about 1460 to his death in 1493, Carlo Crivelli remained true to his early teaching. Whoever understands his works has little need to consult further the entirely similar achievement of such great Ferrarese painters as Marco Zoppo (1440 ca.–1498) and Cosimo Tura (1430 ca.–1495). The influence of Squarcione passed to the conservative painters at Venice, and influenced the entire Murano school. We have a resplendent masterpiece of this sort in the single known work of Antonio da Negroponte, Figure 216, in San Francesco della Vigna, at Venice. It combines with its evident Squarcionesque features, the magnificence of the old Gothic-Byzantine style, and much of the sweetness of Jacopo Bellini. Its date is about 1450, and the picture is an excellent point of departure for our understanding of the radical reform that came into Venice and all Lombardy with the activity of Andrea Mantegna. [Illustration: FIG. 216. Fra Antonio da Negroponte. Madonna.—_S. Francesco della Vigna._ ]