Not just marble, bronze or stone. The Renaissance master sculptors also created works of great value with terracotta, considered more humble but no less sought after. If Padua and its territory conquered the primacy in this field the merit was of Donatello who in the city, near the Basilica del Santo, opened his shop. After him came Bartolomeo Bellano, Giovanni De Fondulis and Andrea Riccio, reinforcing a tradition that made that area a unicum. Thousands of sculptures embellished churches, shrines, capitals, convents and large abbeys of an area that also embraces Vicenza, Treviso, Belluno and Venice. About twenty works that survived the dispersion caused by indifference, theft and vandalism over the centuries bear witness to the value of this enormous heritage lost in the exhibition "In our image. The terracotta sculpture in the Renaissance. From Donatello to Riccio" that the Diocesan Museum of Padua hosts until June 2, at contingent entrances for precautionary reasons in time of coronavirus.
In the Galleries of the Palazzo Vescovile, the curators Andrea Nante and Carlo Cavalli brought together the most eloquent examples of the output from the artists' forges, from group scenes, such as the Compianti, to the small and refined Madonnas with Child, to the images of Saints venerated by families , works in the area next to those loaned by Italian and international museums. Among the most valuable works is the Madonna and Child by Donatello, loaned by the Louvre. The visitor can also see the Lamentation of Andrea Riccio recomposed, today divided between the Paduan Church of San Canziano and the city's Civic Museums. Even more suggestive, for the tormented history that concerns it, is the Madonna and Child saved by a Poor Clare after the suppression in the Napoleonic era of the Paduan Convent of Santa Chiara, and remained safe until recently in the cloister of the Monastery of the Visitation. Today it has returned to its original appearance after a careful restoration. For the first time on display the surviving fragments of a Deposition, seriously damaged in the bombing of the church of San Benedetto on 11 March 1944.
The terracotta sculpture, after a long period of oblivion, had its boom in Padua in the mid-fifteenth century thanks to the arrival of Tuscan artists, including Donatello, also engaged in the construction of the Basilica del Santo for ten years from 1443. Environmental characteristics, local traditions and external cultural contributions favored the development of a production linked, in particular, to the bronze statuary, also introduced by Donatello, and to the small bronze statue. In the workshop of the Paduan Bartolomeo Bellano towards the end of the century the young sculptor Andrea Briosco, called Il Riccio, made his bones as a sculptor. After attending the Donatellian construction site in the Basilica del Santo, at the beginning of the sixteenth century he developed a cultured and refined style, tended towards a classical nobility with references to the ancient world and also pagan in modeling religious subjects and destined for devotion. This Paduan '' Christian humanism '' was swept away by the Counter-Reformation. "The terracotta - explain the curators - ceased to be appreciated as an autonomous language, thanks to the idea of sculpture imbued with neo-Platonism advocated by Michelangelo and collected by Giorgio Vasari in his 'Lives'".