ess in sculpture, as
though the god were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that
wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained
the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in
Luca's work like a new wild flower. Expression, life, the power to
express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, these are what he really
discovered, and not the mere material of his art, that painted
earthenware, as Vasari supposes.

Of his two great works in marble, the tomb of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop
of Fiesole, at San Miniato, and the Cantoria for the Duomo, of his
bronze doors for the sacristy there, and his work on the Campanile, I
speak elsewhere; but here in the Bargello, and all over Tuscany too, you
may see those terra-cotta reliefs of Madonna, of the Annunciation, of
the Birth of our Lord, painted first just white, and then blue and
white, and later with many colours which are peculiar to him and his
school--could such flower-like things have been born anywhere but in
Italy?--and then, if you take them away they fade in the shadows of the
North.

Among the first to give Luca commissions for this exquisite work in clay
was Piero de' Medici. For him Luca decorated a small book-lined chamber
in the great Medici palace that Cosimo had built. His work was for the
ceiling and the pavement, the ceiling being a half sphere. For the hot
summer days of Italy, when the streets are a blaze of light and the sun
seems to embrace the city, this terra-cotta work with its cool whites
and blues, was particularly delightful bringing really, as it were,
something of the cool morning sea, the soft sky, into a place confined
and shut in, so that where they were, coolness and temperance might find
a safe retreat. And it was in such work as this that he found his fame.
Andrea della Robbia, his nephew, the best artist of his school, follows
him, and after come a host of artists, some little better than
craftsmen, who add colour to colour, till Luca's blue and white has been
almost lost amid the greens and yellows and reds which at last
altogether spoil the simplicity and beauty of what was really as
delicate as a flower peeping out from the shadow into the sun and the
rain.

But of one of the pupils of Luca, Agostino di Duccio, 1418-81(?),
something more remains than these fragile and yet hardy works in
terra-cotta. He has carved in marble with something of Luca's gentleness
at Perugia and Rimi