Immortalized, in prayer, kneeling before the Resurrection of Christ. The large, glazed terracotta lunette is almost a will of sorts, commissioned to depict Niccolò di Tommaso Antinori, who died the same year as the work’s creation in 1520: a sign of fortune that would never abandon the great dynasty he founded. Until 1898, the monumental lunette (17 x 36 meters!), weighing half a ton and bestowed with immensely vivid colours in a style that was quintessentially Giovanni della Robbia, adorned the gate at the Villa delle Rose, a country home outside Florence, before being sold in the United States. The channels of patronage can sometimes be infinite… the large work was rediscovered in the storages of the Brooklyn Museum and the Antinori family commissioned its restoration.
After more than century, the lunette has returned to the home of the Della Robbia, the Bargello, accompanied by an experimental interpretation of the piece by Stefano Arienti, creating a sort of journey into the heart of that strange mix of oxide, lead, tin and silica sand on which the fortune of the family of sculptors, the great Della Robbias, was based.