Le Madonne col Bambino per la devozione personale. Invenzione e serialità nella scultura fiorentina del primo Rinascimento

This dissertation investigates Madonna and Child reliefs intended for domestic devotion, produced in early fifteenth-century Florence, with particular attention to works created using “the cast” technique. Despite the significant scholarly attention devoted to the revival of terracotta sculpture, these “serially” produced objects have remained largely marginal to academic studies, notwithstanding their wide diffusion and their importance within the artistic, devotional, and commercial context of the Renaissance. The research focuses on thirteen types of reliefs traditionally associated with the Ghibertian workshop, examining their origins, production techniques, formal variations, attributional issues, and patterns of dissemination. Through a critical reassessment of the literature and the principal contributions on the subject, the study reconstructs the role of the workshops involved, explores the material and pictorial aspects of the works, and investigates the commercial mechanisms that enabled their large-scale production. Particular attention is also devoted to the “second life” of these objects, from their functional reinterpretation in devotional contexts between the early modern and contemporary periods, to their rediscovery within collecting and antiquarian circles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The overall aim is to restore centrality to a long-overlooked body of production, offering a comprehensive interpretation of the origins of seriality in Florentine Renaissance sculpture, while also providing methodological tools to support further research in the field.