The Madonna and Child by Michele da Firenze

CYCLE: Highlights. Paintings and sculptures of Palazzo Venezia
SPEAKER: Aldo Galli
DATE: Thursday, June 9, 2022 at 6 PM
LOCATION: Sala del Refettorio

Michele da Firenze, a student of Lorenzo Ghiberti in the early fifteenth century, was the first Italian sculptor to dedicate himself exclusively to terracotta, an art that at the time experienced an authentic rebirth. Working in many Italian centers, Michele created all kinds of clay works: polyptychs, sepulchres and monumental groups, but also a large number of tabernacles intended for domestic devotion, such as the one of the Palazzo Venezia Museum. The reduced costs of the raw material had decisive consequences on the diffusion of sculpture in the houses of the fifteenth century: within a few years the Madonnas with the Child by Michele da Firenze, Donatello or Luca della Robbia, with their affectionate naturalness, replaced in the rooms the fourteenth-century traditional panel paintings.
 

Aldo Galli is full professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Trento. His research has focused on Renaissance painting and sculpture themes in central and northern Italy, as well as on the relationship between Italian and European art in the fifteenth century. He has dedicated books, articles and essays to famous artists such as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello or the Pollaiolo brothers, but he has also studied contexts less investigated by his studies, such as fifteenth-century sculpture in Ferrara, the spread of terracotta sculpture in northern Italy, the Renaissance art in Genoa. Among the many exhibitions that he has curated or in which he has collaborated are Mantegna, 2008; The arts in Siena in the early Renaissance, 2010; The Ladies of the Pollaiolo 2014-2015; Terracotta sculpture in Padua during the Renaissance, 2020; Donatello, the Renaissance, 2022. Galli is a member of the scientific college of the Federico Zeri Foundation at the University of Bologna.