AFTER ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA, 15TH OR EARLY 16TH CENTURY

The distinctive blue and white colours of the present relief of the Virgin and Child have always been unmistakably connected to the works of the Della Robbia family. Made on a small scale, the present relief was almost certainly intended to furnish a private chapel, and depicts the very intimate scene of the young mother suckling her infant child as a gathering of cherubim overlook from behind. The playfulness of this scene is far removed from the earlier style of Luca della Robbia, whose reliefs tended to display the great pathos of the young Christ's fate, as can be seen in the Virgin's often tortured gaze and the child's fearing pose. This relief is, in fact, closer to Andrea della Robbia, the nephew of Luca, who rendered these scenes of mother and child with a greater sense of humanity, intimacy, and, ultimately, hope. The relief relates most closely to Andrea's Madonna with Nude Child Seated on a Cushion in the Museo Nazionale, Palermo (Marquand, loc. cit.), where the Virgin is depicted as a young woman, veiled, adoringly looking at her child seated on a cushion and with very similar cherubim looking on in the background. The fact that the two reliefs vary in the overall scale and, in the case of the former, by only depicting the Virgin from the waist up, suggest that the present relief was probably conceived on a smaller scale in order to be reproduced in larger numbers by the workshop.