Madonna and Child with Saints

The Museum’s collection of Renaissance and Baroque medals and plaquettes is a resource that has quietly grown apace without attracting much notice. Conceived for the delectation of individual owners, small reliefs of this sort have by their nature remained a classic preserve of connoisseurs. Over the years it has been donors fare more than any curator, however knowledgeable or farsighted, who have brought the necessary concentration or variety or depth to our holdings. Accordingly, the gift of seventy-one objects assembled by the late Erich Lederer of Geneva and presented by his widow will prove to be a significant milestone. Mr. Lederer, then living in Vienna, started to collect in the 1920s; his activity spanned half a century. The pride of the collection is the Italian Renaissance plaquettes, most of them published in a catalogue by Charles Avery for Christie’s in 1985.