della Robbia:

Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Venice

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2016

Role: Exhibition Designer

Team: Curator Marietta Cambareri, Graphic Designer Jennifer Liston Munson

Photos courtesy of MFA, Boston

This exhibition featured 50 objects produced by the della Robbia family workshop in 15th-century Florence. The family invented a technique for glazing terra-cotta that achieved opacities of white, blue, green, and yellow never before seen—a secret recipe and method passed down within the family until the workshop closed roughly a century later, taking the technique with it.

Design and Layout. The exhibition was organized into three sections reflecting virtues central to daily life in Renaissance Florence: Hope, Love, and Faith. Within the rectangular gallery, I created three open spaces that bled into one another, allowing works that bridged themes to be experienced in dialogue with more than one section.

The first section, Hope, housed the domestic objects, with a lower ceiling enhancing the intimacy of the space. At its rear, an 11-foot-wide, 1,000-pound overdoor marked the transition into the exhibition's main room.

The show's centerpiece—a life-size sculpture of The Visitation—anchored the middle section, Love. A slight niche and raised platform set the sculpture apart and gestured toward its original setting. Throughout the exhibition, architectural details such as wall treatments and pedestals drew subtly on Renaissance architecture while maintaining a modern simplicity.

Color and Lighting. Color plays a central role in the della Robbia story. The exhibition opened with a dark blue entry space, low ambient light, and spotlighting to evoke the intimate, private settings for which the domestic objects were originally made. The remainder of the show then opened into a brighter palette of light grays, allowing the blues and greens of the work to read clearly and the whites to pop.