File:Artgate Fondazione Cariplo - Minerbi Arrigo, Madonna.jpg

This work was acquired together with the Collection of the Istituto Bancario Italiano (IBI) in 1991. It is a replica of a sculpture produced by the artist for the door of Milan Cathedral [1] (1943–48) devoted to the events leading up to the Edict of Milan, whereby the Roman emperor Constantine put an end to religious persecution in 313 AD and established the principle of tolerance for all the forms of worship practiced in the empire. The panel depicting The Return of the Martyrs to their Homes shows a woman in a flowing cloak clutching her hands to her breast as she pushes forward in search of her child. In his detailed report to the Cathedral commissioners, Minerbi focused in particular on the description of this figure, in which it is possible to discern the anxious expression of mothers waiting for their sons to return from the front during the years of World War II.

The Madonna in the Cariplo Collection belongs instead to the maturity of the sculptor, who established himself on the art scene in 1919 with a solo show at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan and commissions from Gabriele D’Annunzio to produce the funeral monument for his mother and a copy of the monumental sculpture The Victory of the Piave. It was in 1937 that he received the commission for the door of Milan Cathedral, his most important work.

The sculpture forms part of a vast number of small-sized works constituting replicas or variants of his most celebrated creations, as documented in the Cariplo Collection by Saint Sebastian and Saint Thomas, both produced in the second half of the 1950s. While the irregular surface of the bronze and the intense chiaroscuro contrast lend vitality to the figure, the elegant, sinuous development of the garment and the classical beauty of the face still show the influence of the studies carried out by the artist all through his career on the Tuscan art of the 14th and 15th century.