Italian school; 17th century.

Italian school; XVII century.
"Madonna and Christ".
Bronze and silver plated brass frame.
Measurements: 20,5 x 16,5 cm (x2); 35,5 x 22 cm (frames, x2).
Devotional set, composed of two relief plaques representing the Virgin and Christ. Executed in bronze and framed in silver-plated brass structures topped by small ornamental crosses, the iconography concentrates on two essential figures of Christian devotion. The Virgin is represented in a recollected and meditative attitude, with her head slightly inclined and wrapped in a wide mantle whose folds generate delicate luminous effects on the metallic surface. Christ, on the other hand, is shown crowned with thorns, in a moment of profound pathos, accentuated by the dynamism of the hair, the expressiveness of the face and the tension of the hands. Both reliefs are surrounded by beams of incised rays that radiate from the figures and reinforce their sacred dimension through a visual language inherited from the post-Tridentine mystical tradition.
From a stylistic point of view, the works refer to the bronze tradition of northern and central Italy, where during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an important production of small reliefs was developed, destined both for private oratories and for aristocratic devotional collections. The soft modeling of the volumes, the search for depth through slight gradations of the relief and the refined treatment of the surfaces reveal the persistence of resources derived from the late Renaissance, reinterpreted under the emotional sensitivity of the Baroque.
In this context it is particularly relevant to relate these pieces to the tradition of schiacciato, or rilievo schiacciato, a technique developed in Florentine sculpture in the Quattrocento and associated especially with Donatello. Schiacciato consisted in the creation of spatial depths by means of extremely low reliefs and subtle modulations of the surface, capable of producing complex atmospheric and pictorial effects. Although the present plates belong to a later period and adopt a fully baroque expressiveness, they retain echoes of that Italian tradition in the way space and light are constructed from delicate variations of metallic modeling.