Polychrome Sculpture in Renaissance and Baroque Rome and Lazio imbued the early modern world with colour, material richness, and drama. Far from the monochrome image often associated with Rome, these sculptures—dated between 1250 and 1800—were created with layers of paint, gilding, coloured stones, and mixed media. Crucifixes drip with blood, effigies shimmer in gilded robes, and monuments blaze with marbles of every hue. Colour was not decorative but essential, animating sacred and civic spaces and forging transregional artistic exchanges that linked Rome and Lazio to broader currents in Italian and European art and to the wider world.

This database brings together over 200 objects, many never before studied in detail. Each entry is accompanied by high-resolution images and detailed object information to support research, teaching, and publication. All photographs are freely available for download and use. An interactive digital map will provide the current location of each object. The database is permanently hosted by Queen's University's institutional repository, QSpace.

Authors

Elizabeth Provost (MAC 2025, Queen's University) and Una D’Elia (professor, Queen’s University) created this database. If you have any questions or comments or would like to contribute information or photographs to this database, please contact Una D’Elia (deliau@queensu.ca).

Map

An interactive map of all the sculptures in the database is forthcoming (September 2025). It will be colour coded by material.

Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Other Regions

This database is a part of a larger project to offer information about and high-resolution images of Renaissance polychrome sculpture in different regions of Italy. Four other databases have already been published:

• Renaissance and Baroque Polychrome Sculpture in Lombardy and Piedmont
• Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Puglia and Basilicata
• Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Tuscany
• Renaissance and Baroque Polychrome Sculpture in Naples and Campania

Databases of polychrome sculptures in Naples and Campania, Sicily, the Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Umbria, and Sardinia are in progress, and other regions will follow.

Virtual Exhibitions

Because this database and those for the other regions of Italy include thousands of high-resolution photographs for research and publication, and because entries for each object synthesize previous scholarship, including conservation reports, making this information available to English-speaking audiences, the database can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses, and the students can publish their research in the form of online virtual exhibitions. For more information on using these databases for teaching, please contact Una D'Elia (deliau@queensu.ca). Students in undergraduate and graduate classes at Queen’s have used these databases to create exhibitions:

• Crafting Flesh: Collaboration in Italian Multimedia Sculpture, 1300-1700
• Performing Devotion: The Ritual Uses of Sculpture from the Italian Renaissance to Today
• Sculptures on Stage: The Drama of Devotion in the Italian Renaissance
• Sculpting the Divine in the Italian Renaissance
• The Sculptures are Watching! Behaving and Misbehaving in the Italian Renaissance Home
• Reconstructing the Social Lives of Italian Renaissance Sculptures
• The Colours of Italian Renaissance Sculpture
• Locating the Materials of Italian Renaissance Sculpture

Support

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University, and Queen’s University Libraries.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments about this larger project or would like to collaborate on producing future databases, please contact Una D’Elia (deliau@queensu.ca).

Using the Images

Photographs of sculptures in this collection are freely available for teaching, research, and publication. Photographs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License