OBJECTS IN THE SCULPTURE COLLECTION
The Chellini Madonna
One of the Victoria and Albert Museum's most prized possessions is the bronze roundel given by the sculptor Donatello to his doctor Giovanni Chellini in lieu of payment. It found its way into the Museum on a visitors’ day in 1966.
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On 27 August 1456, the physician Giovanni Chellini Samminiati recorded in his daybook that in lieu of payment he had received ‘a roundel the size of a trencher in which was sculpted the Virgin Mary with the Child at her neck and two angels on each side, all of bronze, and on the outer side hollowed out so that melted glass could be cast on to it and would make the same figures as those on the other side’. The donor was Donatello, arguably the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance in Italy, whom the doctor was treating for a serious illness.
This letter makes the so-called ‘Chellini Madonna’ one of the most important works by Donatello as it can be categorically linked to documentation. In addition to making glass replicas, the roundel may have been intended as a birth tray. This was a flat tray laden with sweetmeats that was brought to a mother after childbirth - examples can be seen in Room 12. The two putti on the right-hand side are carrying a heaped bowl in offering, perhaps alluding to the possible function of the object. However, the reverse of the roundel is a unique feature. No other bronze has such a precise negative mould, though a thinly cast plaquette can sometimes show the ‘ghost’ of an image.
Once the Museum had acquired the roundel, Chellini’s comment about its intended use was put to the test by the glass department of the Royal College of Art and the glass firm of Venini on Murano, Venice. The experiment was successful and one of the glass roundels is displayed with the bronze.
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Apart from the object’s intriguing early history, its life after Chellini is also noteworthy. The former Keeper of Sculpture and then Director, John Pope-Hennessy was aware of the roundel’s existence through reproductions, including one at the Soane Museum, London. He recounts in his autobiography that he was leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy when he ‘ran into David Carritt [the art dealer], who told me that he had found a circular 15th-century bronze relief in use as an ashtray. I asked him to let me see it, and he brought it round the following day. Its front face corresponded with that of the other reliefs. But what mattered was the reverse, and when I turned it over I found the mould described by Chellini.’ The roundel was destined to be exported to the United States. However, after what Pope-Hennessy described as a ‘rather undignified public appeal in the subway’, as well as the sale of limited silver casts from the reverse, it was secured in 1976 and took its place in the Museum’s outstanding collection of Italian sculpture.