Studies in the History of the Renaissance/Luca della Robbia
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA.
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 porcelain, 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 terra-cotta 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 touching suggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly opposed light and shade, and look for their means of expression among the 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 which results from the essential conditions and material 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 that hard presentment of mere form which tries vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture is constantly struggling; 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 Phidias and his pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the individual, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to the individual, all the accidents, feelings, actions of a special moment, all that in its nature enduring for a moment looks like a frozen thing if you arrest it, to abstract and express only what is permanent, structural, abiding.
In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence, or almost like pure thoughts or ideas; and hence that broad 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 for the most part the sacrifice of what we call expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at the broad and general type, which purged away from the individual all that belonged only to him, all the accidents of a particular time and place, left the Greek sculptor only a narrow and passionless range of effects: and when Michelangelo came, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness and introspection, Uving not a mere outward life like the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which sacrificed what was inward 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, character, 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 which the representation of feeling in sculpture always has to harden into caricature. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness, under the furrows of the 'little Melian farm,' has done with a 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 of it, as if in it classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical Christian age, so that of all ancient work its effect is most like that of Michelangelo's own sculpture;—this effect Michelangelo gains by leaving 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, lurks about all his sculpture, 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, feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if that half-hewn form ever quite emerged from the rough hewn stone: and they have vnshed 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, relieving its hard realism, 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. It was in reality perfect finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion and intensity with the expression 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 in pure form and sacrificing all the others, and the studied incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity, passion, energy, which would 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 individuals—the tomb of Conte Ugo in the Abbey of Florence, the tomb 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; and they unite the element of tranquillity, of repose, to this intense and individualised expression by a system of conventionalism as subtle and skilful as that of the Greeks, by subduing all the curves which indicate solid form, and throwing the whole into low 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, the 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 of plain white 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 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 terra-cotta figures simply white, he added the further invention of giving them colour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them. Cosa singolare e molto utile per lo state!'—a curious thing and very useful for summer time, 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-cottas, 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 extreme degree that peculiar 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 the workman himself very near to us, the impress of a personal quality, a profound expressiveness, what the French call intimité, by which is meant a 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 at bottom perhaps it is the characteristic 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 unmistakeable degree that one is anxious to know all that can be known about them and explain to oneself the secret of their charm.