The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve (c. 1400): Art, History and Details

The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve (c. 1400) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Olivuccio di Ciccarello (Italian, Marche, 1360/65–1439).

The work and its context

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

The Madonna is seated humbly on the ground nursing her child. Saint George and the Archangels Gabriel and Michael kneel nearby, while Christ’s disciples appear radiating from the Madonna’s halo in the form of stars. In contrast with the Virgin’s purity, Eve lies in the lower part of the painting. Coaxed by the serpent, she raises the forbidden fruit to her mouth, thus condemning humankind through her original sin. The juxtaposition of these two images affirms the Incarnation and the role of Christ and the Virgin in the redemption story. The deep scratches on the surface of the panel, especially on the serpent’s face and Eve’s wrist, likely resulted from a zealous Christian’s symbolic attack on the power of evil. The artist, Olivuccio di Ciccarello, is known to have been active in the Marche in central Italy. Little is known of his life except that he was an important and prolific painter in Ancona, where he died. His paintings were formerly attributed to Carlo da Camerino, an apparently nonexistent artist, on the basis of a mistaken reading of his signature on a crucifix.

Object facts

• Title: The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve
• Date: c. 1400
• Creator attribution: Olivuccio di Ciccarello (Italian, Marche, 1360/65–1439)
• Culture: Italy, the Marches, late 14th-early 15th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: tempera and gold on wood panel
• Dimensions: Framed: 191.5 x 99 x 11 cm (75 3/8 x 39 x 4 5/16 in.); Unframed: 181.5 x 88.6 cm (71 7/16 x 34 7/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Medieval Art
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.795

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.
• G. U. "The Holden Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 2 (1917): 19-34.
• Paintings in the Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1945.

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.