Davanzati Museum

Madonna and Child

Date: 13th century
Technique and Materials: detached fresco
Size: cm 160×105
Artist: Umbrian painter

The iconography of the nursing Madonna (Galaktotrophousa) is also derived from the Byzantine tradition, translated here into less rigid forms, accentuating the Virgin’s tender attitude towards her son. Of interest is the solution for the drape of fabric, with its small geometric patterns of horizontal stripes, which replaces the back of the throne.

Madonna and Child between Saint Joseph and Saint Jerome

DateDate: last quarter of the 15th century
Technique and Materials: panel
Size: cm 135 (diameter)
Artist: Tuscan painter

This tondo depicts the Virgin, with a thoughtful expression, wearing a refined pearl pin in her head-dress. The forefinger of her left hand points to the cartouche held by the Child, who is sitting on a cushion with tassels. The saints are identified on the basis of their attributes: the cardinal’s hat for Saint Jerome and the staff for Saint Joseph. The painting has stylistic features that are reminiscent of such illustrious Renaissance masters, as Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Ghirlandaio, and reveal the hand of a minor 15th-century Florentine artist who drew on renowned examples, eclectically mixing the various components. The charm of this work is enhanced by its beautiful coeval frame, carved and decorated with a festoon motif in the Della Robbia manner and ascribable to 15th-century Florentine production, which can boast other similar examples found on famous paintings (Signorelli, Berruguete) in Florentine museums.

Great Hall

Madonna (or Saint Anne?) Holding a Book

Date: mid-15th century
Technique and Materials: painted terracotta
Size: cm 82 ×63 × 38
Artist: Ferrarese sculptor

From the Church of San Giovanni Battista in Ferrara, this sculpture depicts a female figure, defaced at knee level, who is holding a half-closed book in her right hand. Various iconographic interpretations have been put forward: ranging from a Madonna Holding a Book and an Our Lady of the Annunciation, to its recent identification – based on documents of the conservatory where it was located – with Saint Anne teaching the Virgin to read.

Bust of a boy

Date: 1460 – 1465
Technique and Materials: marble
Size: cm 42 (height)
Artist: Antonio Rossellino

This work is reminiscent of the delicate heads of young boys by Desiderio da Settignano. It has been ascribed to Antonio Rossellino and dated to the 1460’s. This attribution results from the reference in the style and form to the right-hand putto holding a drape on the right of the cardinal of Portugal’s tomb in the Church of San Miniato a Monte. It is a complex work carried out by Antonio Rossellino together with his brother Bernardo and some disciples, with the participation of Luca della Robbia and the painters Piero del Pollaiolo and Alesso Baldovinetti, from 1461 to 1466. This is a beautiful example of the refined private portraiture widespread in Florence in the second half of the 15th century as well as valuable testimony to humanistic attitudes. The bust has also been interpreted in a religious key as depicting the Infant Jesus or the Infant Saint John, because of the attire, but also owing to the incompletely worked hair on the top of the head and the presence of a small hole on the nape that may suggest the previous presence of a halo.

Madonna and Child

Date: 1402 – 1405
Technique and Materials: terracotta
Size: cm 70 (height)
Artist: the Master of di San Pietro d’Orsanmichele (Filippo Brunelleschi?)

This terracotta work represents a half-length Madonna and Child, an extremely widespread typology traditionally assigned to Lorenzo Ghiberti, of which there are many examples. Recently critics have related this work to Filippo Brunelleschi. a comparison has been suggested with those works (the full-length Madonna and Child in the Church of San Martino a Pontorme, Empoli, and the Saint Peter of the Butchers’ Guild of Orsanmichele in Florence) believed to have been created by the young Brunelleschi, who started his revolution in the field of the arts right by reviving terracotta moulding, an ancient technique that had fallen into disuse in the Middle Ages. With its still Gothic character, the Madonna and Child at Palazzo Davanzati might be among the oldest terracotta sculptures to have been carried out in Florence in the modern age. It was made using a mould from a prototype that critics have recently identified with the Madonna and Child of the Fiesole Seminary, which still retains its original colours.

The façade of Palazzo Davanzati

The courtyard of Palazzo Davanzati