DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61670#0037
CHAPTER I
LUCA AND ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA—BIOGRAPHICAL
It is not within the province of this study to attempt any
analysis of the Renaissance movement, in the most strenuous
moment of which Luca della Robbia was born. He is too
classic and tranquil an artist, too definite in his aims, to be
fully representative of its exuberant and complex spirit. The
scientific problems so absorbing to most of his contemporaries,
their probing of human emotions, their efforts to overthrow
all the restrictions which tradition and ignorance had till then
imposed on art, and to exploit to the utmost its possibilities,
had but a subordinate interest for him. He seems to have
held himself calmly aloof from the general passion for experi-
ment, as one who knew instinctively the hard and fast boundary
beyond which the artist may not go.
That he must have devoted his student days to earnest and
laborious study, however, is proved by his complete science and
mastery of technique, but artistic problems seem to have inter-
ested him only in so far as he might gain by their solution
entire freedom for self-expression. His concern was not in
pushing the possibilities of his material to their utmost limits,
but in expressing most significantly some deep-lying thought
or grand ideal, in interpreting most pregnantly all the Beauty
of existence, moral, intellectual, and physical. While the
Florentine artists, painters as well as sculptors, struggling
after their great leader Donatello, were absorbed in all kinds
of scientific problems, bent on portraying Humanity in all
its aspects, copying with equal gusto its beauties and defects,
rending the veil of Idealism and Imagination from Nature
LUCA AND ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA—BIOGRAPHICAL
It is not within the province of this study to attempt any
analysis of the Renaissance movement, in the most strenuous
moment of which Luca della Robbia was born. He is too
classic and tranquil an artist, too definite in his aims, to be
fully representative of its exuberant and complex spirit. The
scientific problems so absorbing to most of his contemporaries,
their probing of human emotions, their efforts to overthrow
all the restrictions which tradition and ignorance had till then
imposed on art, and to exploit to the utmost its possibilities,
had but a subordinate interest for him. He seems to have
held himself calmly aloof from the general passion for experi-
ment, as one who knew instinctively the hard and fast boundary
beyond which the artist may not go.
That he must have devoted his student days to earnest and
laborious study, however, is proved by his complete science and
mastery of technique, but artistic problems seem to have inter-
ested him only in so far as he might gain by their solution
entire freedom for self-expression. His concern was not in
pushing the possibilities of his material to their utmost limits,
but in expressing most significantly some deep-lying thought
or grand ideal, in interpreting most pregnantly all the Beauty
of existence, moral, intellectual, and physical. While the
Florentine artists, painters as well as sculptors, struggling
after their great leader Donatello, were absorbed in all kinds
of scientific problems, bent on portraying Humanity in all
its aspects, copying with equal gusto its beauties and defects,
rending the veil of Idealism and Imagination from Nature