Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
catch a glimpse of him in the garden of Lorenzo's villa directing the
studies in art of a number of young people, among whom was the youthful
Michelangelo. But of the real disciples of Donatello, those who, without
necessarily being his pupils, carried his art a step farther, we know
nothing. His influence seems to have died with him. Tuscan art after his
death, and even before that, had already set out on another road than
his.
Something of that expressiveness, that _intimite_, which Pater found so
characteristic of Luca della Robbia, seems to have inspired all the
sculptors of the fifteenth century save Donatello himself. Not vitality
merely, but a wonderful sort of expressiveness--it is the mood of all
their work. It is perhaps in Luca della Robbia and his school that we
first come upon this strange sweetness, which is really a sort of
clairvoyance, as it were, to the passing aspect of the world, of men, of
the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them. What
the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturalness in sculpture, as
though the god were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that
wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained
the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in
Luca's work like a new wild flower. Expression, life, the power to
express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, these are what he really
discovered, and not the mere material of his art, that painted
earthenware, as Vasari supposes.
Of his two great works in marble, the tomb of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop
of Fiesole, at San Miniato, and the Cantoria for the Duomo, of his
bronze doors for the sacristy there, and his work on the Campanile, I
speak elsewhere; but here in the Bargello, and all over Tuscany too, you
may see those terra-cotta reliefs of Madonna, of the Annunciation, of
the Birth of our Lord, painted first just white, and then blue and
white, and later with many colours which are peculiar to him and his
school--could such flower-like things have been born anywhere but in
Italy?--and then, if you take them away they fade in the shadows of the
North.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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