Description

The collection of post-antique Italian sculpture in the Detroit Institute of Arts is considered among the three finest and most comprehensive outside Europe; however, this large and distinguished collection, whose formation began a century ago, has never been published in its entirety as a museum catalogue. Ranging from early medieval, pre-Romanesque stone carvings of the eighth and ninth centuries to works created more than a millennium later, the collection numbers over 350 pieces of Italian sculpture in wood, stone, terracotta, stucco, porcelain and bronze. More than half of the collection consists of sculpture from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (or the Early, High and Late Italian Renaissance), and approximately one-fifth dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (roughly, Italian Gothic sculpture). Although the remainder is more or less equally balanced in number between the eighth to the twelfth centuries, and those pieces from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, the latter group of Italian baroque to nineteenth-century sculpture contains some of the most important and most recently acquired Italian works of art in the collection.