Saint Peter Martyr

This shaved, or tonsured, priest once stood on the right side of a small altarpiece which Crivelli painted for the church of San Domenico, in Ascoli Piceno, in the Italian Marche. He is Saint Peter Martyr, the second saint of the Dominican Order, and their first martyr. Peter clasps his hands in prayer, and raises his eyes to look up at the ‘Lamentation over the Dead Christ’ which once topped the altarpiece. The falcastro, a long-handled curved knife, with which he was murdered splits his skull, and a second dagger is thrust into his shoulder.His black and white robes stand out powerfully against the scrolling damask patterns of the burnished gold ground. In a detail typical of Crivelli, the toe of his shoe juts out over the edge of the marble parapet, casting a shadow on the step below, and curls up so we can see its sole. With a love of realistic detail reminiscent of Netherlandish painters such as Rogier van der Weyden, Crivelli has picked out the individual hairs in Peter’s eyebrows and tonsure and the veins that pulse in his forehead.Saint Peter was especially important in the Italian Marche, where he had lived and preached for many years, as a bitter campaigner against heresy. Born in Verona in 1206 to parents who were heretics, Peter joined the Dominican Order in the 1220s and became one of its most fervent preachers. In 1251 the Pope made him Chief Inquisitor for Milan and Como, an office which he carried out with such enthusiasm that the heretics of northern Italy hired two assassins to kill him.On 6 April that year Peter was walking from Como to Milan when he met one of these assassins, Carino da Balsamo, outside a wood. Carino struck Peter several blows on the head with his falcastro and Peter fell to the ground. He clung to life, reciting the Creed – an early statement of Christian faith still widely used in Christian liturgy – and is said to have written its opening words, ‘Credo in Unum Deum’ (‘I believe in one God’), in his own blood. To finish him off, Carino stabbed him through the heart with a dagger. Peter’s body was carried to Milan, miracles ensued and he was swiftly canonised. Carino, his murderer, repented and became a friar himself. Here, Peter was the counterpart of Saint Jerome at the other end of the altarpiece, both stalwarts of Catholic orthodoxy.Crivelli was skilled at exploiting the optical effects of the different gold surfaces. The contrast between the damask tooling of the gilded background, and the flat burnished gold and raised pastiglia of his halo must have acted as a spotlight on his face in the candlelight of a medieval church. The blade of the falcastro and the swirling handle of the dagger are burnished silver – now tarnished – and must also originally have shone brightly. Crivelli’s skill as a painter of drapery is such that although Peter’s robes are black we can see the deep folds where his hood and cloak fall around his shoulders, and the creases in the tops of his shoes.