The Virgin with the Laughing Child (1460–75), one of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s most celebrated sculptures, was the subject of an interdisciplinary research project in 2022 prompted by longstanding questions surrounding its origins and making. Collaborative research was undertaken by a team composed of curators, conservators and scientists at the V&A and at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF) and Musée du Louvre. The results presented here bring together new technical analysis and art-historical investigation to illuminate the processes employed in the creation of the sculpture, its life as an object, and its relationship to other Renaissance terracotta sculptures. This article first reviews what little is known of the sculpture’s provenance prior to its arrival in the V&A in 1858 and reconsiders the question of its attribution, while also exploring the object’s function and iconography. Material analysis of the clay composition was carried out using petrography, X-ray diffraction and particle-induced X-ray emission. Optical analysis, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray computed tomography (CT) acquisition and data visualization enabled greater understanding of its construction. These methods revealed new and unexpected information regarding the composition of the clay, in particular that it was a mixture of two distinct sources. Through material comparison with other Renaissance terracottas, including data from over sixty studies carried out by the C2RMF, and exploration of contemporary workshop practice, we concluded that artists were regularly choosing to use mixtures of different clays for their sculptures, suggesting greater technical knowledge than has previously been assumed. CT data visualization also sheds light on the original construction methods and later repairs.
Hubbard et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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