above all, Giovanni da Bologna's flying Mercury (82), showing what
exceedingly beautiful mythological work could still be produced when
the golden days of the Renaissance were over. It was cast in 1565,
and, like many of the best bronzes of this epoch, was originally
placed on a fountain in one of the Medicean villas.
On the second floor, first a long room with seals, etc., guarded by
Rosso's frescoed Justice. Here, and in the room on the left, is a most
wonderful array of the works in enamelled terra cotta of the Della
Robbias--Luca and Andrea, followed by Giovanni and their imitators. In
the best work of Luca and Andrea--and there is much of their very best
and most perfect work in these two rooms--religious devotion received
its highest and most perfect expression in sculpture. Their Madonnas,
Annunciations, Nativities and the like, are the sculptural counterpart
to Angelico's divinest paintings, though never quite attaining to his
spiritual insight and supra-sensible gaze upon life. Andrea's work is
more pictorial in treatment than Luca's, has less vigour and even at
times a perceptible trace of sentimentality; but in sheer beauty his
very best creations do not yield to those of his great master and
uncle. Both Luca and Andrea kept to the simple blue and white--in the
best part of their work--and surrounded their Madonnas with exquisite
festoons of fruit and leaves: "wrought them," in Pater's words, "into
all sorts of marvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural
colours, only subdued a little, a little paler than nature."
To the right of the first Della Robbia room, are two more rooms full
of statuary, and one with a collection of medals, including that
commemorating Savonarola's Vision of the Sword of the Lord. In the
first room--taking merely the more important--we may see Music,
wrongly ascribed to Orcagna, probably earlier (139); bust of Charles
VIII. of France (164), author uncertain; bust in terra cotta of a
young warrior, by Antonio Pollaiuolo (161), as grandly insolent and
confident as any of Signorelli's savage youths in the Orvieto
frescoes. Also, bust of Matteo Palmieri, the humanist and suspected
heretic, by Antonio Rossellino (160); bust of Pietro Mellini by
Benedetto da Maiano (153); portrait of a young lady, by Matteo
Civitali of Lucca (142); a long relief (146) ascribed to Verrocchio
and representing the death of a lady of the Tornabuoni family in
child-birth, which Shelley greatly admired and described at length,
under the impression that he was studying a genuine antique: "It is
altogether an admirable piece," he says, "quite in the spirit of
Terence." The uncompromising realism of the male portraiture of the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is fully illustrated in this
room, and there is at the same time a peculiar tenderness and
winsomeness in representing young girls, which is exceedingly
attractive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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