Madonna and Child with Eight Angels

Around 1450 the Florentine sculptor Donatello was in Padua, finishing the bronzes for the high altar of the basilica of Saint Anthony, among them small reliefs of child angels singing and playing instruments. Marco Zoppo was a young painter in the city a few years later, and this Madonna was shown in 2022 in a Donatello exhibition in Florence. The reason is easy to see. The eight angels around the Virgin are heavy, solid children who look almost carved. Two blow long trumpets, and one plucks a lute. The Virgin, crowned, nurses the Child behind a marble parapet laid with books. At each end of that parapet are the arms of the Dardani, a Venetian family also settled in Verona and Padua. The picture later went to Lord Wimborne in England, and the Louvre acquired it from his descendants in 1980.