The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth century are
more than mere forerunners of the great masters of its close, and often
reach perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose on
their work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli and
the churches of Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimate
impress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the
art of Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, and
often almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and we
come with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders.
One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who have given
expression to so much power and sweetness; but it is part of the
reserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their existence, that
their histories are for the most part lost, or told but briefly. From
their lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound and colour has
passed away. Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del Rodario, whose
works add a new grace to the church of Como, Donatello even--one asks in
vain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days.
Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more of a
history, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed through his work.
I suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to
mind as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by which he is
best known, like fragments of the milky sky itself, fallen into the cool
streets, and breaking into the darkened churches. And no work is less
imitable; like Tuscan wine, it loses its savour when moved from its
birthplace, from the crumbling walls where it was first placed. Part of
the charm of this work, its grace and purity and finish of expression,
is common to all the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca
was first of all a worker in marble, and his works in earthenware only
transfer to a different material the principles of his sculpture.
These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the most part
in low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies something of its
depression of surface, getting into them by this means a pathetic
suggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are haters
of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade, and
seek their means of expression among those last refinements of shadow,
which are almost invisible except in a strong light, and which the
finest pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of their work is
EXPRESSION, the passing of a smile over the face of a child, the ripple
of the air on a still day over the curtain of a window ajar.
What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief?
Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school to which he
belongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and this
system of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome the
special limitation of sculpture--a limitation resulting from the
material and the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and which
consists in the tendency of this work to a hard realism, a one-sided
presentment of mere form, that solid material frame which only motion
can relieve, a thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality of
expression pushed to caricature. Against this tendency to the hard
presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of
nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each great
system of sculpture resisting it in its own way, etherealising,
spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The use
of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by
borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by
strictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of
colour; to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the too
fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form--this is the
problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in three
different ways.
Allgemeinheit--breadth, generality, universality--is the word chosen by
Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to express
that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his
pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the
individual, to abstract and express only what is structural and
permanent, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him,
all the accidents, the feelings, and actions of the special moment, all
that (because in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to
look like a frozen thing if one arrests it.
In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence,
or almost like pure thoughts or ideas: and hence the breadth of humanity
in them, that detachment from the conditions of a particular place or
people, which has carried their influence far beyond the age which
produced them, and insured them universal acceptance.
That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and unspirituality of
pure form. But it involved to a certain degree the sacrifice of what we
call expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at the
broad and general type, at the purging away from the individual of what
belonged only to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular time
and place, imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptor
limits somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with a
genius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by its
spirit of inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward life
like the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows,
consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of what was inward and
unseen could not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greek
sculpture as he was, work which did not bring what was inward to the
surface, which was not concerned with individual expression, with
individual character and feeling, the special history of the special
soul, was not worth doing at all.
And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is,
and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for his work
individuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hard
realism, that tendency to harden into caricature which the
representation of feeling in sculpture must always have. What time and
accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "little
Melian farm," have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of
Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit
in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in it
classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical
Christian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient work
most like that of Michelangelo's own:--this effect Michelangelo gains by
leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness,
which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of the
wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de'
Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace,
almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the
quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all
his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting,
however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and
feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if the
half-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn
here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the
charm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is
Michelangelo's equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of
etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and
communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a
characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of
life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect
finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion and
intensity with the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets not
vitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression.
Midway between these two systems--the system of the Greek sculptors and
the system of Michelangelo--comes the system of Luca della Robbia. And
the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both of
the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain select
elements only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studied
incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity,
passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature.
Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense and
individualised expression: their noblest works are the studied
sepulchral portraits of particular persons--the monument of Conte Ugo in
the Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the
wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of the
Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo--monuments which abound in the
churches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued
Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement:--and they unite
these elements of tranquillity, of repose, to that intense and
individual expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful and
subtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all such curves as indicate solid
form, and throwing the whole into lower relief.
The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure and
no excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artistic
processes, the struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution of
purely artistic problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth
century. After producing many works in marble for the Duomo and the
Campanile of Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors of
that age, he became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that
sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisite
and expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery, to
introduce those high qualities into common things, to adorn and
cultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly characteristic
of the Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below its
superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world modesty and
seriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that what
was good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their own
houses. Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mere
rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a
few hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success,
to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with its
strange, bright colours--colours of art, colours not to be attained in
the natural stone--mingled with the tradition of the old Roman pottery
of the neighbourhood. The little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up
in that district from time to time, are still famous. These colours
haunted Luca's fancy. "He still continued seeking something more," his
biographer says of him; "and instead of making his figures of baked
earth simply white, he added the further invention of giving them
colour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them"--Cosa
singolare, e multo utile per la state!--a curious thing, and very useful
for summertime, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye. Luca loved
the forms of various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts of
marvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, only
subdued a little, a little paler than nature. But in his nobler
terra-cotta work he never introduces colour into the flesh, keeping
mostly to blue and white, the colours of the Virgin Mary.
I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual
measure that special characteristic which belongs to all the workmen of
his school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positive
information about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen
themselves very near to us--the impress of a personal quality, a
profound expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which is
meant some subtler sense of originality--the seal on a man's work of
what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of
apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest
intensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still
in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially,
perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes works in the imaginative
and moral order really worth having at all. It is because the works of
the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in an
unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known about
them, and explain to oneself the secret of their charm.
1872.