The terracotta relief depicts a standing female saint, haloed and wearing a long robe, holding a book and a palm in her hands. She looks slightly to her right. The sculpture is in a nineteenth-century frame, with the painted inscription at bottom, SANCTA . VERDIANA. MONACHAE, and the arms of a monastic house, with a Cross of Lorraine, three mounts and the letter M. The reverse of the relief is flat, the clay slightly scooped out before firing for the body of the saint. There are two French customs labels and the penciled number 3132. A thermo-luminescence text was carried out on a sample of clay from the back of the relief in 1985.¹ This provided a last date of firing for the clay of between 246 and 333 years earlier, i.e. 1652–1739.

According to the inscription on the frame, the sculpture depicts Saint Verdiana (1182–1242), born into a noble family in Castelfiorentino in 1182 and a contemporary of Saint Francis of Assisi. From a very early age, Verdiana dedicated her life to serving and succouring the poor. After a pilgrimage to Compostella, Verdiana returned to Castelfiorentino, where she lived as a recluse in a cell for the next thirty-four years, speaking to visitors from a tiny window through which she also received the meager food upon which she subsisted. During the final years of her life she is said to have been tormented by two serpents, which became her attributes on her canonization. The cult of Saint Verdiana remains popular in Tuscany to this day, under the aegis of the Congregazione Vallombrosana.

The absence of the serpents from the present relief would suggest that the saint is not Verdiana as the inscription on the frame implies. Nor is it likely that she is Saint Agnes, as claimed when Percy Straus acquired the relief, since Agnes is almost always accompanied by her attribute of a lamb. The saint is in fact most probably Saint Catherine of Alexandria, often portrayed carrying a book and sometimes a palm, as a symbol of her martyrdom.

The sculpture comes from the celebrated collection of the French collector Gustave Dreyfus who, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, built one of the finest ever private collections of Renaissance paintings and sculpture. In the summer of 1930, more than a decade after Dreyfus’s death, the entire collection was sold by his heirs en bloc to the dealer Joseph Duveen, who seems to have bought it in some form of partnership with Nathan Wildenstein and Arnold Seligmann.² commissioned sumptuous catalogues of the Renaissance bronzes, medals, and plaquettes, which he placed on the market as integral collections. Eventually bought by Samuel H. Kress, they form the basis of the world-class holdings in these areas of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. For the marble and terracotta sculpture on the other hand, Duveen privately published a catalogue in a limited edition of just twenty-four copies.³ Most of this part of the Dreyfus collection also ended up in museums, notably the National Gallery of Art, and a private collections in the United States.

The figure of the standing female saint does not appear to have ever been regarded as one of the highlights of the Dreyfus collection. It does not feature in the series of articles on the collection published in Les Arts in 1908, during the lifetime of the collector, or in a subsequent article published in 1925.⁴ Nor was it included in Duveen’s privately printed catalogue of the finest sculptures from the collection, or in an article on the collection in the journal Pantheon.⁵

No doubt, as Seligmann was known to be the Straus’s favored dealer, it was agreed between him and Duveen that he would handle this particular transaction. The sculpture was sold to Straus as an autograph work by Luca della Robbia (1399/1400–1482), the founder of the Della Robbia dynasty of sculptors. This attribution was supported by Leo Planiscig, who wrote to Percy Straus that the relief was “unquestionably a work of Luca della Robbia, in my opinion from his early period.”⁶ In his expertise written in English which accompanied the letter, Planiscig added that he had frequently seen the relief in Dreyfus’s collection.

Late in his life, Planiscig repeated his opinion in print, in the second edition of his monograph on Luca della Robbia, in which he claimed the relief to be an autograph work on the basis of analogies he perceived with the figures of angels on the marble and enameled terracotta tabernacle in the church of Santa Maria, Peretola.⁷ However, as John Pope-Hennessy trenchantly observed, “There is no substance in this comparison.” The relief, although in the general style of certain works by Luca della Robbia and his nephew Andrea (1435–1525), is somewhat poorly conceived and summarily executed.

The sculpture would no doubt have been condemned as an imitation from the nineteenth century, when the works of the Della Robbia family enjoyed extraordinary popularity, were it not for the results of the thermo-luminescence text carried out in 1985. This test, which measures the last date that the clay sculpture was fired, suggested a dating within the decades around 1700. If for some reason a sculpture has been exposed at a later date in its life to another firing, for example if it is repaired, then this is the result that the thermo-luminescence test will provide. It is therefore possible that the female saint is a fifteenth-century sculpture by a secondary artist, which has subsequently undergone a second firing. But it is also not inconceivable that a sculpture in the style of a fifteenth-century master might have been made during this period; for example, Donatello continued to be greatly admired through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁸

—Jeremy Warren