Donatello's Radical Madonna and Child

• In Event: Donatello

Abstract

Donatello experimented throughout his career with depicting the Madonna and Child in statues and low and high relief in marble, bronze, terracotta, glass, and stucco, some rich with paint and gilding, and with leather, glass, and colored wax inserted into the surface. He created variations on traditional types and proposed radically new ways of imagining the Mother and Child. I will focus on an ambitious late work, a large, polychrome terracotta relief in the Louvre, in the context of the tradition of half-length devotional images, which were often touched, kissed, and adorned, and in relation to practices of clothing images of baby Jesus, and stories of speaking with, touching, or stealing sculptures of the Christ Child from his mother's statue. I will explore how Donatello invites but also frustrates such a direct, tactile relationship with his work, which is neither a speaking likeness nor an icon.

Author

• Una Roman D'Elia, Queen's University, Kingston