Past event

Art History Research Lecture: Dr Rachel Boyd The 'Dudley Madonna': Devotion, Design, Display

Join us for Dr Rachel Boyd Research Lecture on ‘The ‘Dudley Madonna': Devotion, Design, Display' and a wine reception afterwards at 79 North Street.

Abstract:
Perhaps the most controversial work of art included in the 2022–2023 trio of exhibitions devoted to the great Renaissance sculptor Donatello is a small marble relief of the Virgin and Child known as the Dudley Madonna, acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1927. The curators of the recent Florence and Berlin exhibitions presented the sculpture as an influential masterpiece by Donatello, whereas in London it was described as possibly nineteenth century and derived from a lost original. This fundamental disagreement, and the interest it generated among scholars and museum visitors, prompted my review of the object and its attribution, leading to a new display in the V&A's galleries. My presentation offers a new reading of the object, considering not only its probable maker, but also its facture, iconography, and the network of other sculptures, drawings and paintings to which it relates. On the one hand, the puzzle of the Dudley Madonna demonstrates the continuing centrality of connoisseurship to sculpture scholarship and curatorial work. On the other, it asks what level of certainty we can, or should, attempt to offer our visitors, especially when — as in the case of so much Renaissance sculpture — evidence is limited.

Biography:
Rachel Boyd is Senior Curator of Renaissance Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Before joining the V&A in 2023, she worked at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, where she contributed research and writing for a new catalogue of the museum's Italian drawings. Rachel earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, with a dissertation on the glazed terracotta sculptures of the Della Robbia workshop in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence.