This sculpture was traditionally ascribed to Luca della Robbia while in the Duveen collection, and before that in the Arnold Seligmann and Jacques Leon Stern collections. By the mid-1960s, as Mr. Simon was seeking opinions about the stucco from scholars of Italian sculpture, the overwhelming response was that the piece was good, and that the pigment was for the most part original and fifteenth-century, but that it was not by Luca della Robbia or his workshop. John Pope-Hennessy, the pre-eminent Renaissance scholar and Donatello specialist, was the first to suggest that the object was by Buggiano (Andrea di Lazzaro Cavalcanti, Italian sculptor and architect, 1412–62). Indeed there are at least two other similar versions of this work in the Bardini Museum in Florence and the Detroit Institute of Arts that are attributed to this Florentine student of Filippo Brunelleschi.
Details
- Artist Name: Cast from a model by Luca della Robbia (Italian, 1400-1482)
- Title: Madonna and Child
- Date: mid 15th century
- Medium: Polychromed stucco bas-relief
- Dimensions: 26 x 18-1/4 in. (66.0 x 46.4 cm)
- Credit Line: The Norton Simon Foundation
- Accession Number: F.1965.1.107.S
- Copyright: © The Norton Simon Foundation
Object Information
Jacques Leon Stern, sold (New York, Parke-Bernet, 4 November 1950 lot 232 to);
[Duveen Brothers, New York (stock no. 30130), sold 1965 to];
The Norton Simon Foundation.
installation
- New York, Duveen Brothers, 1959 to 1959
Lock, Stock and Barrel: Norton Simon's Purchase of Duveen Brothers Gallery
- Norton Simon Museum, 2014-10-24 to 2015-02-16
- Reymond, Marcel, Les Della Robbia, pp. 96-97
- Bode, Wilhelm, Florentiner Bildhauer der Renaissance, pp. 182-183
- Burrows, Carlyle, Herald Tribune, p. 7
- Art News, p. 16
- Denkmäler der Renaissance-Sculptur Toscanas, pp. 77, 208, 245
- Schottmüller, Frida, Die Italienischen und Spanischen Bildwerke der Renaissance und des Barocks, 1913, pp. 37-38
- Bode, Wilhelm, Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance, 1928, p. 122
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. D85 p. 448
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