Workshop of Andrea Della Robbia

Private collection, England, early 20th century;

Thence by descent until acquired by the present owner

Attributed to the workshop of Andrea Della Robbia, this glazed terracotta architrave exemplifies the charm and character that distinguished the celebrated Florentine atelier during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The present relief would have formed part of a continuous frame, typical of the composition of many later altarpieces from the workshop of Andrea Della Robbia. A relief of the Assumption of the Virgin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. 82.4) features a similar band of cherub faces. Another altarpiece of this type with a Madonna and Child is at The Hermitage, St Petersburg, the cherubs framed with an almost identical white bead-and-button moulding.

The closest comparison though are four almost identical architrave sections in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (inv. no. 7417-1860). The examples at the Victoria and Albert Museum also feature six-winged cherub heads in the same more unusual purple and yellow coloured glaze with the cherub faces left unglazed. This was a period in which the Della Robbia workshop produced various altarpieces and other works in partially glazed polychromed terracotta, with unglazed sections (mostly the figures’ flesh tones) originally painted in oil, as these fragments presumably were. The comparable composition, colour, and dimensions of the Victoria and Albert sections suggest that they were most likely from the same original work as the present lot. Robinson suggested that these pieces, and presumably the present lot, would have formed the ‘crowning arch-band of a large altar-piece’ (op. cit., p. 67).

RELATED LITERATURE

J. C. Robinson, Italian Sculpture of the Middle Ages and Period of the Revival of Art: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Works Forming the Above Section of the Museum, with Additional Illustrations from Various Other Sources, London, 1862, p. 67, nos. 7417-7420; J. Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1964, I, pp. 229-230, nos. 224-227, III, p. 158, figs. 231-234