Madonna and Child
Donatello (c. 1386-1466) · c. 1445-1455
The Virgin holds the Child close against her cheek, and the two faces, pressed together, form the heart of the composition. Everything else, the heavy folds of the mantle, the halo, the painted background, radiates from that point of contact. The relief is modelled in terracotta and painted, so that the flesh tones, the gilded edges and the coloured drapery survive as the fifteenth century saw them. Look at the Child's hand clutching his mother's veil and at the Virgin's downcast eyes: this is a tender image, but a grave one, as if she already foresees what awaits her son.
Donatello, the greatest sculptor of the early Florentine Renaissance, made reliefs of the Madonna for private devotion throughout his career, and this one is dated to his maturity, around 1445 to 1455, the years when he was working in Padua and back in Florence. It is said to come from the chapel of San Lorenzo at Vigliano in the Val d'Elsa, in the Tuscan countryside. The Louvre bought it in Florence in 1880 from the antiquarian Stefano Bardini, the dealer through whose hands passed much of the Italian sculpture now in European museums.
Did You Know? An early Louvre curator wrote down the wrong village as the relief's origin, and the mistake was only corrected by later research.
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