Currently situated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Luca della Robbia’s Virgin and Child with Lilies is a sculpture created in relief to give the impression that it has been raised above the background plane. This fine piece of art has been sculpted from terracotta, a glazed clay-based ceramic and along with clear religious aspects; the work of art is given a hard realism via individual techniques of the artist.
The relief shows colors such as blue, white, green and gold and they demonstrate Luca della Robbia’s approach to adding color to sculpture, which Pater explains to be an ‘unskillful contrivance to effect, by borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by strictly appropriate