Variations on a Madonna by Pietro Alamanno

CYCLE: Highlights. Paintings and sculptures of Palazzo Venezia
SPEAKER: Riccardo Naldi
DATE: Thursday, July 7, 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 devote himself exclusively to terracotta, an art that was living 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 use, such as the one kept in the Palazzo Venezia Museum. The reduced costs of the raw material had decisive consequences in 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 the fourteenth-century traditional panel paintings.

Riccardo Naldi is full professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Naples "L'Orientale". He has dealt in particular with figurative production in southern Italy between the Middle Ages and the modern age, investigating on its connections with other centers of the Peninsula and Europe. In addition to numerous articles and contributions, his works include books on Andrea Ferrucci (2002); Cesare da Sesto (2009); Giovanni da Nola (2012); Bartolomé Ordóñez and Diego de Siloe (2019), Girolamo Santacroce (2020) and the curation of several collective volumes.