(CITTA DI CASTELLO)
]
Luca della Robbia is surely one of those immortal artists whose work
hardly has a date. It might have been immortal _a parte ante_ as well as
_a parte post_. It has no obvious beginning, being purely natural and
simple. His own invention of enamelled terra cotta, which after a time
he perfected with colour, gave him a material that did not alter and the
dainty clear surface whereof takes no smirch of time. It is most
appropriate to his fresh and spiritual genius, which, finding nothing
quite fitted to it in the gold and bronze of its earlier labours,
devised this ware, plastic as clay and cheerful as porcelain. Enamelled
terra cotta is perpetually young. Most appropriate to his genius and to
his material also was the subject of his art. The Virgin and Child are
necessary to that lovely art; they are the centre, they sit enthroned
over the arch or the middle stone of the doorway it decorates, and the
little laymen stand about them with their heavy garlands. Let us add
that with the gaiety of porcelain, the Della Robbia ware has no
triviality; it is sweetly venerable; its pale blue and white especially
accords with the oldest convent threshold that it ever brightened.
Matteo Civitali and Verrocchio, also Tuscans, and like the Della Robbias
sculptors of children (to apply the name of sculptor somewhat loosely),
were architects chiefly, and therefore sculptors as a matter of course.
They are not so sportive as their predecessor Donatello in his earlier
work, but follow him rather in the graver dignity to which that great
sculptor had changed his type in course of time. A Bambino of
Verrocchio’s gives the benediction, standing before a regal mother
richly apparelled; so does a Bambino of Benedetto da Maiano’s; one of
Pellegrini’s clings closely to the neck of her who leans one beautiful
cheek upon his head; but amongst the innumerable variations of attitude
appropriate to sculpture in many a form, from that of enamel to that of
bronze, there is nothing quite like one of Jacopo della Quercia’s
groups, where the Bambino and the Virgin look into each other’s eyes.
The Madonna and Child of a thousand other designs, in sculpture as in
painting, are not intended to seem alone. The Child giving the
benediction has the city and the world before him, or at any rate a
congregation of Tuscan people; he who smiles from his place on the
mother’s knee has the passers-by on the dusty roads in sight; and the
Suckling who looks over his round shoulder is startled because someone
perhaps kneels too near. But this one Mother and Child are quite alone;
he has both hands upon her shielding arm, and holds back his head and
meets her eyes fully. In much Italian art (as I have been obliged to
repeat) there is some form of grace that hinders immediate action and
expression; but these workers in terra cotta have no such interception,
no such thing postponing, deferring, removing the expression of life,
preventing and hindering the close clasp which is the only real manner
of holding a baby. Let this solitary Mother and Child be one example,
and we shall find others in Desiderio da Settignano’s portrait-busts at
South Kensington, tender and fine models of creative childish life. Here
we find no preoccupation or prejudice (such as the painters so soon
assumed), tending quickly to commonplace and platitude. Desiderio (his
date is somewhat later than Luca della Robbia’s, but Luca is the master
of the rest) has observed the childishness of the protruding upper lip,
that innocent incident of infancy, as the protruding lower lip is an
experienced incident of old age. The one and the other were modelled in
these terra cotta busts from life. Luca della Robbia observes also the
weakness of the soft mouth of childhood, with the underlip a little
sucked in; he models the lips lightly and feebly apart, in two of the
portrait-busts at South Kensington. Domenico da Capo d’Istria has a fine
erect Bambino, as upright in his spirit as in his attitude; no twist, no
head aside is his; and Mino da Fiesole is equally frank in his Saint
John the Baptist. These are examples, and no more, representatives of a
great school of natural art that lasted nearly a century in Italy.
[Illustration:
_Jacopo della Quercia_ _Walker & Cockerell Ph Sc_
_Madonna and Child._
]
[Illustration: