Image: Andrea della Robbia, 'Madonna and Child' (detail), ca. 1470–75, glazed terracotta. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Edith and Herbert Lehman Foundation Inc., 1969
‘Rediscovering Della Robbia at The Met’ opened at The Met Fifth Avenue on 10 August 2026 and runs until 17 January 2028 in Gallery 521, free with museum admission. According to the Museum, it is the first time in its history that a significant selection of its Della Robbia glazed terracottas has been shown together in a dedicated gallery.
The display gathers eleven masterworks by three generations of the family: Luca, who devised the glazed terracotta technique in Florence around 1440, his nephew and heir Andrea, and Giovanni, the last head of the workshop. Most had been in storage for decades and have been conserved and in some cases re-attributed through new research. They are shown with two loans from a private collector and two promised gifts from the Dick Wolf Collection; Giovanni’s ‘Mystic Mandorla’ lunette has now formally been gifted to the Museum and is paired with Andrea’s lunette of Saint Michael the Archangel to show how Giovanni widened the earlier white-and-blue palette.
The centrepiece is Andrea della Robbia’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’, known as the Marquand Altarpiece: a work roughly ten by seven feet made up of 66 glazed terracotta sections, given in 1882 by founding trustee Henry G. Marquand and off view for almost 70 years. The Met describes it as the first monumental Italian Renaissance sculpture to enter its collection. Research for the exhibition moves the attribution from Andrea’s workshop to Andrea himself with his shop, around 1485. Thirty-three of the newly conserved sections are mounted in place against a graphic rendering of the whole, beside a large animated virtual reconstruction built from 3D scans that suggests how the altarpiece was originally assembled.
The exhibition is co-curated by Denise Allen, curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and guest curator Federica Carta, Slifka Foundation Interdisciplinary Fellow. An accompanying issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin carries essays by Carta and Allen with Sarah E. Lawrence, Gloria de Liberali, Brett Renfer and Wendy Walker. The exhibition is made possible by Lilly Endowment Inc. and Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill, with additional support from Barbara and Jon Landau.
