The circular relief depicts the Virgin cradling the Christ Child, who grasps the hem of her mantle, the Mother and Child gazing fondly towards one another. The Virgin wears a belted tunic below her robe and a headscarf; Christ wears a simple tunic. The figures are haloed, the Virgin’s halo a little smaller than in the rectangular versions of the model, discussed below, in order to allow the design to fit into the circular tondo form.

The sculpture, formed as a concave bowl, is heavily damaged, with large sections on each side of the main figure group lost and replaced. There is a crack across the neck of the Virgin. The relief is decorated with white tin-glaze on the figures and blue on the tondo’s background. The eyes and eyebrows are very lightly painted on the glaze, not beneath it.

On the back the terracotta is hollowed out within the general shape of the Virgin and Christ Child. There are two incisions in the surface for repair rivets, which are now gone. There are some glaze spills in center, but there does not appear to be any crack in the relief here, through which the glaze could have seeped.

The relief was conserved in 2016.¹ At this time, the relief underwent X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy examination at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Menil Collection Scientific Laboratory, with the aim of determining the materials present in the glaze and body of the original sculpture and the replacement sections, as well as the surface paint applied to the eyes of the figures.² The examination confirmed that the lead silicate glaze, with tin used as the opacifier, is broadly consistent with products of the Della Robbia workshop, and that the composition of the replacement sections is quite different, confirming that these are indeed replacements. Much earlier, in 1985, a thermo-luminescence text was carried out on a sample of clay from the back of the relief.³ This provided a last date of firing for the clay of between 400 and 760 years earlier, i.e. 1225–1585.

This beautiful, intimate composition must once have enjoyed great popularity, to judge from the number of surviving versions. The best known is the enameled terracotta roundel version in the Palazzo Corsini in Florence, first published in 1904, as a work of Luca della Robbia of around 1470, by Marcel Reymond.⁴ The model has since then been universally known as the “Corsini type” and has consistently been associated with Luca della Robbia the Elder, the founder of the Della Robbia dynasty of modelers of tin-glazed sculpture.

Allan Marquand grouped the model with two other designs by Luca for intimate small-scale pyramidal Virgin and Child compositions, the no less popular “Impruneta” type, in which the Christ Child leans more heavily on the Virgin, her right hand supporting him under his left arm,⁵ and the so-called “Friedrichstein Madonna,” in which the Virgin holds both of Christ’s legs in her right hand, mother and Son gazing intently at each another.⁶ The Impruneta Madonna is usually dated to around 1445,⁷ and the Corsini and Friedrichstein types to the late 1430s or the 1440s.⁸

Pope-Hennessy described the Corsini model as “of some importance in the sequence of Luca della Robbia’s Madonnas” and “a strikingly progressive solution of the geometry of the tondo form.”⁹ There has been much debate as to whether the polychrome tin-glazed version in the Corsini collection is an autograph work of Luca della Robbia, as Reymond proposed. Marquand wrote that “possibly this is an original by Luca himself, but probably a replica by another hand,”¹⁰ a view shared by Pope-Hennessy,¹¹ Gentilini,¹² and most other subsequent scholars. However, Schubring¹³ and Bode¹⁴ both regarded the Corsini roundel as an original work by Luca and it has in recent years been exhibited with a tentative attribution to this effect.¹⁵

Most surviving versions are, like the Corsini Madonna and the version in Houston, in circular tondo form. They include one in unglazed terracotta set into the architrave of a doorway in the Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova in Florence.¹⁶ There is another enameled terracotta version in the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa.¹⁷ Versions in stucco include one in the cloister of Santa Maria in Castello in Genoa,¹⁸ another recently on the art market,¹⁹ and one sold from the Hainauer Collection to Duveen.²⁰ Giancarlo Gentilini also drew attention to a version in marble in the Camposanto of the Certosa di Ferrara.²¹

A smaller group of rectangular versions survive, including one in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Montepradone near Ascoli Piceno, which was given to the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in around 1470 by the Franciscan preacher Saint James of the Marches (1391–1476).²² Saint James’s early biographer Venanzio da Fabriano stated that this relief was given to the saint in around 1468–69 by his friend Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, the future Pope Sixtus IV. Other rectangular examples are in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin,²³ Victoria & Albert Museum, London,²⁴ Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,²⁵ and the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.²⁶ Yet another, in a contemporary pilastered tabernacle frame, was in the 1918 Bardini sale in New York. The reliefs in Berlin, London, and Oxford are products of the same, probably mid-fifteenth century, Florentine workshop, with identical original simple wooden frames and identical punched decoration in the backgrounds of the Berlin and Oxford versions.

Of the rectangular versions, the one in Paris, made of stucco and set within a tabernacle frame, is closer in form to the Corsini Madonna. The Virgin and Child stand behind a parapet, over which the Christ Child’s foot and the end of the Virgin’s robe extend, which echoes the felicitous way in which, in the Houston roundel and its cognates, the robe dips over the edge of the roundel. The rectangular reliefs in Berlin, London, Montepradone, and Oxford (fig. 65.1) depict the Virgin and Child above a crescent moon, symbolic of the Immaculate Conception, as is the sunflower decoration punched into the background of the Berlin and Oxford examples. The Immaculate Conception variation was retained in a debased popularizing derivation in maiolica, made in Montelupo in the early seventeenth century,²⁷ as well as in a series of casts in terracotta in the region around Mantua, many above the entrances to houses.²⁸

The Houston version was highly thought of by Frank Jewett Mather, the assistant of Allan Marquand, doyen of early Della Robbia studies. In the 1928 addendum to Marquand’s series of monographic volumes on the Della Robbia, Mather wrote of the Houston Virgin and Child, then in New York in Percy Straus’s collection, that “in quality it seems the best of the series.” He also suggested that it might be identifiable with the tin-glazed version formerly in the collection of Adolf von Beckerath in Berlin, recorded by Marquand in his 1914 monograph on Luca della Robbia, along with an unglazed version.²⁹ Although the unglazed version appeared in the auction held in 1916 after von Beckerath’s death, the tin-glazed example did not, and no further information on it appears to exist, so this provenance is unverifiable. The date of the sculpture’s purchase, from the Italian dealer Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, has in the past been recorded as 1921, on the basis of a letter from Contini to Percy Straus, confirming the purchase of the sculpture, together with a portrait by Lucas Cranach, for 600,000 lire.³⁰ The date on the letter is not very clear and it is in fact more likely to have been 1925. The reason for this is that the files also contain two expertises, both from that year, from F. Mason Perkins and from Roberto Longhi, who frequently provided Contini with his statements of authenticity.

—Jeremy Warren