In a Crivelli painting you expect eye-catching detail; fruit, flower, birds. Their function is to symbolise a facet of the sacred mystery shown. However, in this painting there is one detail which is anything but symbolic. The little woman praying by the feet of St Francis looks like a nun but, in fact, she is a widow wearing a customary black veil. Her late husband’s will had asked that she found a chapel where Mass could be offered for the repose of his soul. She is positioned in the customary place of the patron. but her late husband’s absence is striking, once noticed. Moreover, the inscription at the base of the throne tells the viewer that she paid for this work “at no small expense and of her own money”. Her name was Oradea Becchetti. The two saints who flank the Virgin’s throne must have been of her choosing. The choice of St Francis was an obvious one: it was a Franciscan Church. St Sebastian can only have been included for one reason: his cult as a plague saint. The Madonna and Child to whom she prays are closely styled on a type of Byzantine icon known as Eleusa or the Virgin of Tenderness. This church was located in the Marches which had been ravaged by plague in the last decades of the 15th Century. There was an established tradition of invoking the protection of Our Lady of Tenderness from the plague and so by referencing the ancient icon in the embrace of the Virgin and Child Crivelli asks for her intercession also. As in so many of his altar pieces, Our Lady is shown enthroned, as the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, flanked by saints and symbols, but in this one, the embrace of Mary and Jesus sled on the ancient icon tells the viewer that although Oradea Becchetti may have prayed for the soul of her dead husband, for greatest concern was for the living and their protection from the plague.
Edinburgh Catholic Chaplaincy