The colors of the Virgin Romanesque polychrome wood sculptures in Italy and a question about azurite

This essay considers color as an important cultural and visual marker. Her recent study of the largest collection of wooden sculpture in Italy, preserved in the National Museum of Palazzo di Venezia in Rome—part of a research project supervised by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (MiBACT) and financed by The Getty Foundation—was an opportunity to focus attention on the purpose of polychromy in wooden sculpture in Europe in the medieval and modern age. Among these sculptures is the so-called Madonna of Acuto, one of the most fascinating Romanesque statues, remarkable for its stylistic quality and state of preservation, and now at the origin of her research entitled Romanesque polychrome wood sculptures in Italy. In this essay, she establishes a relationship between the nature of pigments, iconography, and symbolism of colors.