Saint Nicholas of Bari (1472): Art, History and Details

Saint Nicholas of Bari (1472) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Carlo Crivelli (Italian, 1430/35–1495).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Saint Nicolas of Bari, patron saint of children, sailors, and travelers, and the prototype of Father Christmas, was bishop of Myra (Lycia) in Asia Minor during the AD 300s. His remains were said to have been taken to Bari in Italy during the 11th century. The saint is shown vested as bishop in an elaborately embroidered cope, fastened with a morse, and holding a crosier. By the mid-1400s, most Florentine artists had stopped using gold backgrounds in their pictures, preferring instead naturalistic backgrounds of landscapes and blue skies. However, elsewhere in Italy gold-ground painting remained popular, as in this painting by Crivelli, a a painter of conservative Late Gothic decorative sensibility, who spent his early years in the Veneto where he absorbed influences from the Vivarini, Squarcione, and Mantegna. By 1458 he left the Veneto and was never to return; he spent most of the remainder of his career in the March of Ancona, where he developed a distinctive personal style that makes a contrast to his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Bellini.

Object facts

• Title: Saint Nicholas of Bari
• Date: 1472
• Creator attribution: Carlo Crivelli (Italian, 1430/35–1495)
• Culture: Italy, Venice
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Tempera and gold leaf on wood panel
• Dimensions: Framed: 109 x 41 x 6 cm (42 15/16 x 16 1/8 x 2 3/8 in.); Unframed: 96.2 x 32 cm (37 7/8 x 12 5/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Medieval Art
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1952.111

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "'St. Nicholas' by Carlo Crivelli." The Bulletin of the Cleveland of Museum of Art 39, no. 7 (September 1952): 187-189.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.