Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/82

60 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 ex-