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The Imagined Made Real: The interaction between sculpture and painting in the work of Carlo Crivelli

A fully-funded PhD studentship in partnership with Oxford Brookes University

Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

The National Gallery offers a small number of Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentships, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and run in partnership with higher education institutions. These studentships focus on specific themes relevant to the Gallery's collection and wider research themes.

Research project

This project, focused on the work of the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli, allows for a re-appraisal of the interaction, both physical and ideological, between painting and sculpture in 15th-century Italy. It was in Italy, in the middle of the 15th century, when the highly influential concept that sculpture and painting were separate art forms began to be articulated coherently for the first time in the post-classical world. But, curiously, during this very period, a number of influential artists – most particularly Verrocchio and Michelangelo – moved between these art forms, and others who worked primarily in one of these media  – including Donatello, Masaccio and Mantegna – were inspired by, and shaped their work, in relation to developments in the other. This PhD makes a focused study of Carlo Crivelli, the relatively unstudied 15th-century painter whose work was profoundly influenced by sculpture and three-dimensionality.