Donatello and the Mellon Madonna: interpreting the execution of Donatello’s designs

The Mellon Madonna, a painted terracotta statue of a standing Virgin, slightly under life size, supporting a sleepy Christ Child, came to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1937 as a work of Donatello. Features that diverge from his style, especially in the flow of drapery and in Mary’s facial expression, prompted an attribution change in 1976 to an anonymous Florentine sculptor working around 1425, under the influence of Donatello, Ghiberti and Jacopo della Quercia. The sculpture’s presence in the Donatello exhibitions of 2022–23, and technical analyses of the facture and polychromy in preparation for those exhibitions, have led to a new hypothesis: that Donatello created a model for the Mellon Madonna and produced the full-sized statue in collaboration with an unidentified assistant. This article argues for this idea based on stylistic and technical evidence, aiming also to shed new light on quattrocento sculptural techniques and forms of collaboration.