The Virgin and Child

The present Virgin and Child statuette follows the form of the Madonna in the church of SS. Annunziata in Trapani, Sicily. This over-life-size marble statue, stylistically in the mid-fourteenth-century orbit of Nino Pisano, was much venerated; It rapidly gained a reputation for its miraculous properties and by the fifteenth century copies were being made in good numbers by Francesco Laurana and others (Kruft 1970). This copying quickly turned into mass-production in different materials and varying sizes: most of these are in marble or alabaster, but several examples in ivory are known, including a more frontally-posed version in Bolgona (Venturi 1906, fig. 743). It seems likely that the present piece acted in turn as the model for a larger ivory Virgin and Child, also in the V&A (V&A Mus. no: A.550-1910).