The figure of the Virgin Mary and her baby, Jesus, is an important and very well known topic among the renaissance era all throughout Europe. They have ben captured in countless paintings and sculptures and depicted in nearly the same composition, yet every artist has unique ways of portraying the image of Mary and her baby. As I walk along the many works of art in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts I spot Donatello’s Madonna of the Clouds and Luca della Robbia’s Virgin and Child with Lilies. Both of these reliefs contained the same image: the Virgin Mary cradling her child with angles surrounding the pair, yet because of the artists material and style both had crafted a completely different array of emotion and form of storytelling. One form of art, one set of figures, and two completely different stories. Reliefs are a type of sculpture that is crafted from a flat plane and then slowly …show more content…
Various materials can be sculpted from to create a relief, some deeper and some subtler. By comparing the two different sculptures one in Glazed Terracotta and the other in Marble, you can immediately see differences in how to story in conveyed. As I come upon Luca della Robbia’s Virgin and the child with lilies I am immediately struck by the colors of the sculpture piece. The smooth application of the color and the glaze that goes over the terracotta is what gives it its vibrancy. Terracotta, a type of clay, is soft and easily molded compared to Donatello’s marble Madonna of the Clouds. The entire sculpture looks as if it is encased in wood and the raised ground at the feet of the Virgin is what really gives the entire piece as a whole, a sense of depth. It pushes the Virgin and her baby forward while the angels in in the top look farther off towards the back of the sculpture. The raised floor gives the viewers the idea that the Virgin, the baby and the lilies are placed on the ground while the angels are floating above them, but other than