NARRATOR: This beautiful Madonna and Child, made by Luca della Robbia, may have originally been set on the corner of a building in Florence. Curator Luke Syson:

LUKE SYSON: To look at this as the artist intended it's best to move slightly to the right, to where both the Madonna and the Child in her arms are looking at us directly. Christ Child blesses us, and you can quite easily read the letters on the scroll which he's holding, which translate from Latin as "I am the light of the world."

Luca della Robbia is best known now for having invented a new technique for sculpture -- not just modeling in clay but then firing the resulting piece and glazing it, to give it this wonderful glossy surface.

The whiteness of the two figures gives them a kind of allusion to both the classical world and ancient marbles, but also makes them, in a sense, otherworldly.

Luca della Robbia seems to have looked very carefully at classical sculpture in making this piece.... There's also something about the seriousness of this piece, the monumentality that links it to the ancient world. So, what you're seeing here is a brilliant amalgamation of the Christian tradition and that of ancient Greece and Rome.