After Antonio Rossellino (Settignano 1427 - 1479 Florence) Italian, second half 19th century

The original 15th century marble relief of The Nativity by Antonio Rossellino is in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Between 1837 and 1844, the relief was reproduced by Lorenzo Bartolini for the commemorative monument to Countess Zamoyska in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, but the figures in the background were replaced with gold tesserae (cf. Falletti et. al, no. 70).

There is a full-scale 19th century marble copy of the Bargello tondo in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg which is catalogued as “workshop of Bartolini?” (cf. Androsov, p. 175) and there was a plaster cast of the relief circulating in Germany by at least 1888, when the Victoria and Albert Museum in London received a plaster copy from the Königliche Museen in Berlin (there was a terracotta variant of the original composition which was formerly in the Königliche Museen in Berlin). By 1894, the plaster cast maker Oronzio, working in Florence, was advertising that a plaster cast of the relief could be purchased from him.  

While all of these variants show small changes to the composition, they unquestionably derived from the same Bargello model which was clearly a popular composition into the 19th century.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. Pope-Hennessy, Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture, Princeton, 1980, figs. 13 and 14;

S. Androsov, Museo Statala Ermitage. La scultura italiana dal XIV al XVI secolo, Catalogo della Collezione, St. Petersburg, 2008, app. no. 1, p. 175;

F. Falletti et. al., Lorenzo Bertolini, Beauty and Truth in Marble, Florence, 2011