Jacopo della Quercia

(Siena 1374 – 1438)

Our Lady of the Pomegranate, 1403-06

Carrara marble

Museo della Cattedrale, inv. MC036

The Madonna of the Pomegranate, by Jacopo della Quercia, is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of 15th-century Italian sculpture. Commissioned in 1403 by the executors of Virgilio Silvestri’s will, the majestic work was placed on the family altar in the ancient cathedral in September three years later. The solid volume of the figure and the majesty of the forms represent the artist’s blatant homage to Tuscan figurative culture, but its extraordinariness lies in his ability to combine Central Italian solutions with the achievements of Northern Italian Gothic sculpture. To all this Jacopo also adds an extraordinary skill in the depiction of reality, as seen in the hand of the Virgin holding the pomegranate, in the hairstyle and even in the knot of the robe, as well as in the arched line of the Child’s body accompanying the soft drapery. This is an extraordinary work dear to the devotion of the people of Ferrara, who since the eighteenth century have called her the “White Madonna” or, more affectionately, the “Madonna of Bread,” since in the scroll of the law that the Child holds in her little hand, the characteristic shape of the typical Ferrara bread was recognized.