Madonna della Scala

In spite of its limited size, the Madonna della scala has a monumental air; with the female figure occupying the whole height of the relief. The significance of both the stairs from which the relief takes its name and the children, two of them dancing and the other two apparently stretching a piece of cloth behind the Madonna, remains ambiguous. The date of the relief has been and still is much disputed: however, the consensus appears to hover somewhere around 1490, and therefore before the Battle of the Centaurs.