Crivelli is one of the most individual of painters, and no collection is so rich in his works as the National Gallery. He was a native of Venice, and his work shows marked affinities with the school of Padua. Of his life, little is known except that in, or shortly before, the year 1468 he settled at Ascoli in the Marches of Ancona. In that neighbourhood he seems to have spent the rest of his life, in the employment mainly of various religious fraternities. He thus lived somewhat outside the artistic world of his time, a fact which serves to explain the rather conservative character of his art. Thus he adhered to the _tempera_ medium. He adhered also to the Byzantine traditions of the old Venetian School with its fondness for the "ancona," or altar-piece consisting of many single figures each in its separate compartment, and for gilt and silvered ornaments in high relief. There is, too, a vein of affectation in his pictures which contrasts strongly with the naturalistic tendency in contemporary Venetian art. Owing to a little touch of vanity in the painter we are able to date many of his pictures. For it is known that he was knighted in 1490, and so proud was "Sir Charles" of his new honour that he signed all subsequent pictures "Carlo Crivelli, Knight." No. 724 is probably the first he finished after the reception of the coveted honour. His love of accessories, and especially of fruit, will strike every visitor; and so also will the brilliance of his colouring and the unerring, if somewhat harsh, exactness of his outlines. For tender pathos the present picture is remarkable. His range was, as we shall see, somewhat limited. He seldom attempted compositions on any large scale, and his subject pictures are few: No. 739 is one of the best of them. He excelled rather in single figures, and in these we find expressed, "in quaint combination, morose asceticism, passionate and demonstrative grief, verging on caricature, occasional grandeur of conception and presentment, knightly dignity, feminine sweetness and tenderness mingled with demure and far-fetched grace" (Sir F. Burton). Up to the end of the eighteenth century Crivelli's works were still to be found in their original places, in the churches and convents of Eastern Italy, where they attracted little attention. The suppression of the convents after the age of the Revolution brought them into notice, and English collectors purchased them in large numbers. In recent years this appreciation has steadily increased. The large altar-piece, 788, was bought in 1868 for £3360. At the Dudley sale in 1892, the altar-piece, now in the Berlin Museum, fetched £7350.