BIAF: rare work "Christ in Pietà" by Giovanni della Robbia

Rare object, which constitutes an important acquisition in the corpus of new works to be referred to Giovanni della Robbia - as the comparison with the lively, savory figures that animate the predella of the Nativity today in the Bargello easily reveals, modeled in 1521, this is undoubtedly unusual, suggestive peace in glazed terracotta, depicting the Christ in Pietà among the mourners surrounded by the symbols of the Passion: admirable in re-proposing an altarpiece in small dimensions and in condensing in the iconography so devout in the ostentation of the symbols of redemption, a late Gothic figurative tradition that from the Pietà by Lorenzo Monaco at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence is projected into the early sixteenth century .

An image that we can imagine once held in the hands of some man of the church during his meditations on the sufferings of Christ, punctually described with narrative vividness precisely to accompany the reflection and suspended in the sky as if they were an apparition. The peace, with a hole in the top made after firing and which has a nineteenth-century ink inscription on the back, smoothed and rounded at the edges, with a reference to Luca della Robbia, is in good condition, except for modest chips on the edges and on the forehead of Christ and Saint John and some falls in the kneeling figure on the left. Unusual in Della Robbia's production, the symbols of the Passion that could have a precedent in the extraordinary marble altar of the Corbinelli chapel (about 1490-1492) in Santo Spirito in Florence by Andrea Sansovino, where in the pilasters they appear hanging from ribbons with an extraordinary and bizarre illusionistic game , are attested in the monumental altarpiece of the Visitation between Saints Sebastian and Rocco (after 1524) by Giovanni della Robbia in Lamporecchio (Gentilini 1992, p.323). Around the same turn of the year around 1530, they also appear in the arch of the Renacavata altarpiece, near Camerino, depicting the Madonna and Child between Saints Francis and Agnes, modeled by Santi Buglioni perhaps on the occasion of the foundation of the Capuchin convent (Santarelli, 1998).

Precisely the presence so visible in this work of the symbols of the Passion of Christ, at least in this specific case, seems to reflect a favorite form of devotion and in close relationship with Capuchin spirituality, attested since the Albacina Constitutions: "that the friars do not keep curious figures in their cell but some poor things, or some crucifix, or some other simple little cross with the mysteries of the Passion, such as a spear, sponge, nails".
Finally, it should be remembered that in the context of the production in glazed terracotta, still in Santi Buglioni, in November 1553, the abbot of the Florentine Badia commissioned two lost tables for the church of the Croce dell'Alpe near Cutigliano in Pistoia, both with, in the frames, the symbols of the Passion: a Pietà and saints"co pillars cornice and pre- of the co trophies of the passion, and a crucified Christ surrounded by an ornament of trophies of the passion” (Gentilini, 1992, p. 441). From the text by Alfredo Bellandi.