ptors fill their works with intense and
individualised expression: their noblest works are the studied
sepulchral portraits of particular persons--the monument of Conte Ugo in
the Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the
wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of the
Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo--monuments which abound in the
churches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued
Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement:--and they unite
these elements of tranquillity, of repose, to that intense and
individual expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful and
subtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all such curves as indicate solid
form, and throwing the whole into lower relief.

The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure and
no excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artistic
processes, the struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution of
purely artistic problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth
century. After producing many works in marble for the Duomo and the
Campanile of Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors of
that age, he became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that
sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisite
and expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery, to
introduce those high qualities into common things, to adorn and
cultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly characteristic
of the Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below its
superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world modesty and
seriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that what
was good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their own
houses. Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mere
rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a
few hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success,
to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental 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
biograph