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E-MAIL CREDITS |
 The
Madonna della scala, or Madonna of the Stairs, of which no mention
was made during Michelangelo's lifetime, was cited for the first time
in the Giunti edition (1568) of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, where it is
stated that the work had been donated "not many years ago"
by Leonardo Buonarroti to Duke Cosimo I, "who regards it as unique."
Before this donation, it is very likely that the work had remained
in the artist's house on Via Ghibellina, and this was where it returned
in 1616, when Grand Duke Cosimo II gave it back to Michelangelo the
Younger as a mark of recognition for the work of glorification of
his great forefather that he was carrying out in the monumental rooms
on the piano nobile in those very years. Vasari noted the link between
the Madonna della scala and the work of Donatello, stating that it
"was executed ... after the style of Donatello, and he acquitted
himself so well that it seems to be by Donatello himself, save that
it possesses more grace and design." And yet, even in this early
work, Michelangelo's relationship with Donatello appears extremely
personal and intense and undoubtedly represents a break: a fascinated
reexamination, but at the same time a challenge and a dismissal.In spite of its limited size, the work has a monumental air, with the female figure occupying the whole height of the relief, from the top to the bottom. The significance of both the stairs from which the relief takes its name and the children, two of them dancing and the other two apparently stretching a piece of cloth behind the Madonna, remains ambiguous. The date of the relief, which has traditionally been considered, from Vasari onward, a work from Michelangelo's adolescence, has been and still is much disputed: however, the consensus appears to hover somewhere around 1490, and therefore before the Battle of the Centaurs. |
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