- Museum number
- 2018,8006.1
- Description
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Statuette of the Virgin Mary with the dead Christ, made of tin-glazed ceramic. Figure of the Pietà, with the Virgin supporting the dead Christ on her knees, and holding his hand. Modelled in tin-glazed earthenware [maiolica] and painted. The figure group is sculpted in the round, with the Virgin seated on a block, her mantle falling in heavy folds around her feet. One foot projects out into the viewer’s space. She is tenderly holding Christ’s hand; his other hand trails to the ground. The Virgin has an original fired hole in her breast, perhaps intended to hold a jewel to heighten her devotional appeal. Her robe is painted in yellow with antimony orange highlights, while her mantle, which folds around her head and arms, over on knee to the ground, is painted manganese purple-brown with a greenish copper lining and yellow edging to accentuate the draperies. The base supporting the figure group has a projecting cornice painted in yellow and a matching yellow base; the front of the base is cut away and the inside of this section is grooved so as to indicate the presence of a drawer or projecting wooden [?] base into which the figure originally fitted. This would imply that the figure was not only intended to promote prayer but also charitable giving as the figure could be lifted to access coins which had been put into a slot in the gap beneath the Madonna. The ceramic base is painted with leaf and flower scrolls in orange, yellow and green on a blue ground. On the right side of the figure, written onto the white tin-glazed ground of the base, is the inscription in Italian: LA.MADONNA.DELLA.MARINA/DE.CIOZZA.FATTA.ADERVTA.PER.SVA.DEVOTIONE [The Madonna of the Marina of Chioggia, made in Deruta in devotion to her].
- Production date
- 1600 (circa)
- Dimensions
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Height: 35.80 centimetres
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Weight: 4.30 kilograms
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Weight: 9.60 pounds
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Width: 21.50 centimetres
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Depth: 18.40 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
- The statuette reproduces in portable form—as stated in the inscription-- a famous icon of the Madonna della Marina from Chioggia, near Venice. This local cult originated in a vision of the Virgin who appeared locally to rescue fishermen in a storm near Chioggia, on 24 June 1508. She admonished the locals, addressing a peasant in a vision, for their lack of piety, then departed in a boat. Later, the fishermen were rescued from the storm, but an icon, painted with the very image of the Virgin that the peasant had seen, washed up on shore, lying on a log. As news of this find spread a bishop ordered a church to be built to house both the icon and the log which had borne it, and in 1585 the Santuario Beata Virgine della Navicella was built to display both to the faithful. The pilgrimage to see the holy image and log was famous enough to be mentioned even earlier than this, twice, in Marino Sanuto’s early sixteenth-century diaries. After Napoleon’s destruction of the Santuario in 1806, the log and icon were moved to San Giacomo in the city, where both can still be seen, built into the high altar. This is likely to have been the time at which the Madonna left the Church, although the figure might have been taken to a local monastery or convent and then sold at the suppression in the mid 19th Century. Dora is in touch with the Chioggia archivist in the search for any further clues.
The cult was one of many which suddenly appeared in Italy in the Renaissance and which the clerical hierarchy tried to control and regulate. The icon and the log continued to work miracles and is still a force in the local imagination today, as seen in local ex votoes dedicated to her in thanks for grace received which date from the 16th Century to the present and are painted on boards [tolele] or embossed in silver. Many of these are displayed in the church of San Giacomo, near to the altar of the Madonna della Marina, in the Diocesan Museum or on city walls. They are mostly made by fishermen who have survived terrible storms; a corrective to the vision of the pretty fishing village of Chioggia as depicted in prints in our collection [eg; 1949,0411.1641, one of several].
Rudolf Bangel. 1927. Sammlung Gen. Dir. M. Singewald, Leipzig, Italienische Majoliken.Frankfurt: lot 104, plate 11;Bernard Rackham, Catalogue of the Glaisher Collection of Pottery and Porcelain in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2 vols., Cambridge 1935, vol.1, p.286; Julia Poole, Italian Maiolica and Incised Slipware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge 1995, p.211;Leo Spik KG Auktion, Kurfurstendamm 66, 10707, Berlin. Auktion 640, 8 December 2011, lot no. 731, Maya Corry in Madonnas and Miracles, The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, exhib.cat. ed, M.Corry, D.Howard and M.Laven, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 2017, pp.138-39, plate 133; Sacred and Profane Beauty, Deruta Renaissance Maiolica, Frieze Masters London 2017, cat.21.
- Location
- On display (G46/dc2)
- Acquisition date
- 2018
- Acquisition notes
- Art Loss Register Certificate on file. There is maiolica from the Singewald collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
- Department
- Britain, Europe and Prehistory
- Registration number
- 2018,8006.1
