(FLORENCE)
]
But there is another step to be taken from the noble presence of
Donatello, the Della Robbias, Desiderio da Settignano, Pellegrini,
Benedetto da Maiano, Jacopo della Quercia, and the rest of that company;
it is the step into the nineteenth-century tea-room under the same roof
at South Kensington. This is a room decorated in enamelled terra cotta,
Luca della Robbia’s imperishable happy material, from top to bottom, in
singularly distressing colours and designs of which the figures of
children form a part—_putti_ dancing, playing with animals, making music
and so forth, on the brown and white columns. He, or they, who made
these deplorable little figures, had not learnt the principles of the
difficult art of relief, and, working in relief on a cylinder, produced
arms and legs out of all measure and shape. This discouraging
parenthesis is worth writing, if only for the sake of protest against
the modern usurpation of material. The decorators of this tea-room ought
to make their figures out of something modern, and to leave enamelled
terra cotta to those who had a right to it.
To return to Michelangiolo, master of our mixed feelings. Most adult of
men, he creates unearthly, unheavenly children of violence, and twists
them in strife and effort amongst the mighty ornaments of his Sistine
roof; but the young Christs of his sculpture are less than mighty.