'I suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to mind as those pieces of blue and white earthenware,' Walter Pater observed in 1888 when writing about the work of the Della
Robbia family.
Angele Mueller of Tallahatchie Gourmet catered the event The tasting tables were decorated in shades of green using flowers, fruit, and vegetables in the Della
Robbia style.
PERHAPS it's sheer coincidence, but the current rise and rise in the popularity of Della
Robbia pottery - and hence the spiralling sums it's fetching in the saleroom - I reckon is down to the publication earlier this year of the definitive new book on the subject.
ANTIQUE FAIR OFFER | I'M not sure there'll be |any Della
Robbia to buy at The Pavilions of Harrogate Antiques & Fine Art Fair on October 31-November 2, but the event will offer the opportunity to meet Antiques Roadshow expert and wellknown author Judith Miller, below, who will be signing copies of her world famous antique guides.
Luca della
Robbia's fifteenth-century relief also served as a representation of the first liberal art on the Florentine campanile (Figure 2), but moves away from the abstract allegory, which focuses on discipline for unruly children, and instead portrays a more historical scene, in which a master of grammar is shown reading and commenting on a classical text with adolescent male students with distinct features and strong, healthy bodies.
Even the exotic rifle conjures up Blanche DuBois' giddy description of her gown's color: "It's Della
Robbia blue!" In the end, as Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) babbles away on her park bench, she does evoke our pity if not our terror.
It emphasises the creative initiative of four artists in particular who 'founded' the Florentine artistic project of the first half of the 15th Century: Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Luca della
Robbia. All of them flourished within the exhibition's chronological boundaries, between the competition for the design of the Florentine Baptistery north doors in 1401 (in which Ghiberti triumphed over Brunelleschi)--each of the competitor's 'Sacrifice of Isaac' for the doors is on display--and the deaths of Cosimo de' Medici the Elder and Donatello in the 1460s.
The same virtuosity and maturity of expression in ceramic work was rediscovered and reinvented in the Renaissance by the Della
Robbia, who raised it to new levels of greatness with the addition of coloured glazes.
Otra cuestion es la de ese "renacer" como motivo decorativo all'antico en el seno del taller de los Della
Robbia (56); desde luego, nada mas genuinamente florentino en el Quattrocento que Luca della
Robbia y sus obras en barro cocido, vidriado y policromado, que tienen su continuidad, notoriamente acrecentada y divulgada, mas alla de la calidad y cualidad artisticas de las piezas, por parte de su sobrino y heredero Andrea della
Robbia; prolongandose este activo taller con Giovanni della
Robbia y otros miembros de la familia hasta bien entrado el siglo XVI.
Additionally, a frieze surrounding the painting was a reproduction of Luca della
Robbia's "Cantoria," and appears to be the only known full reproduction of his 15th century masterpiece.
However, his greatest commission was to create a Christ Child and crib to accompany the kneeling Madonna by the Renaissance sculptor Giovanni Della
Robbia in Liverpool Cathedral after the original was destroyed.
Tra gli altri documenti presentati, la preziosa testimonianza di Luca della
Robbia sull'esecuzione di due patrizi fiorentini, Pietro Paolo Boscoli e Agostino Capponi, e, di non minore interesse, un testo in versi del famoso Giulio Cesare Croce, il quale descrive, a modo suo, l'esecuzione a Bologna di vari personaggi tra cui anche un ebreo, Manas.
