Virgin and Child (early 1530s): Art, History and Details

Virgin and Child (early 1530s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacopo Sansovino (Italian, 1486–1570).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This statue is a scaled-down version of a marble figure the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino carved for the funerary monument of a nobleman in Verona, Italy. Balancing the stable mass of the Virgin with the seemingly weightless, elongated child draped gracefully across her torso, the composition illustrates Sansovino’s skill. After training in Florence, he relocated to Rome before eventually settling in Venice in 1527. Sansovino contributed significantly to public and private projects across the region, from important civic buildings and tomb sculpture to intimately scaled bronzes, such as this example from his early Venetian period.

Object facts

• Title: Virgin and Child
• Date: early 1530s
• Creator attribution: Jacopo Sansovino (Italian, 1486–1570)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 47.6 x 17.2 x 11.5 cm (18 3/4 x 6 3/4 x 4 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1951.316

A detail from the museum

Sansovino's signature on the base—uncommon for bronzes of this period—marks this as a work of particular importance.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry Sayles. Venetian Tradition: Catalogue of the Exhibition. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1956.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.