Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/75

Rh 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