Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
"May the wings of our souls never fail us," he said aloud, as if it were a prayer. Almost before the time when Vanno Della Robbia had known words enough to clothe his most childish thoughts, he had possessed an unknown land, a kingdom and a castle of his own more beautiful than sunset clouds. To this land he always travelled when he was alone, and often at night in dreams.
Vanno Della Robbia wished to think no more of the false stars that he had followed; for there was every reason now to believe them false stars. Yet something deep down in him refused to believe this; and he could not help thinking of them as before. But he would not give way to what seemed like weakness, and so he fought against the memory.
The Commune of Arezzo has since caused a very beautiful church to be built in this place, accommodating within it the Madonna made by Parri, for which many ornaments of marble have been made, with some figures, both round and above the altar, as it has been said in the Lives of Luca della Robbia and of his nephew Andrea, and as it will be said in due succession in the Lives of those whose works adorn that holy place.
The tender witness and narrator of his last hours is one of the artistic family of the Della Robbia, the learned philologist Luca. If he could only live for a month with pious monks he would truly become spiritually minded.
While national idiosyncrasies the most opposite and the most widely separated in every sense ally themselves in behalf of progress, individual effort is encouraged by the reflection that no walk of art offers a more open field to original genius. Della Robbia, Bernart, Palissy and Wedgwood each found his own material and created his own school.
Sculpture led the race, and in the front ranks was Luca della Robbia, founder of the school which bears his family name. Beginning as a worker in marble, his inventive genius presently wrought out a style of sculpture peculiarly his own. This was the enamelled terra-cotta bas-relief showing pure white figures against a background of pale blue.
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.
Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Orcagna, Verocchio, Ghiberti, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, Luca della Robbia, all underwent this training before they applied themselves to architecture, painting, and sculpture. As the goldsmith's craft was understood in Florence, it exacted the most exquisite nicety in performance as well as design.
Much fine phrasing has been spent upon the effort to analyse the aesthetics of Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but just where does it catch one's breath?
In the Palazzo Comunale the little daughter of Florence has gathered all her broken treasures: here a discarded Madonna, there a Bambino long since forgotten; flowers, too, flowers of the wayside, faded now, such as a little country girl will gather and toss into your vettura at any village corner in Tuscany; a terra-cotta of Luca della Robbia, and that would be a lily; a Madonna by Nero di Bicci, and that might have been a rose; a few panels by Lippo Lippi, and they were from the convent garden.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking