Family Business: The Glorious Art of the della Robbias
[IMG]
[/IMG]
You know the art of the della Robbias. Yes, you do. It’s probably hanging from your front door at Christmas time, inspired by the family of artists known for their decorative art using seasonal fruits, vegetables, berries, pods, fruit and leaves. Nowadays these are commonly called “della Robbia Christmas wreathes.” (The wreath itself, of course, has its own history)
[IMG]
[/IMG]
Or that is what it became over the two centuries in Italy that started with Luca della Robbia in the early Italian Renaissance. Luca, who trained as a goldsmith, worked in marble, bronze...and terra cotta and then invented the family’s “secret recipe,” a fire-glazing protective coating on the finished product. Brunelleschi, whose genius created the dome of Florence’s famous cathedral, had experimented with that medium. But terra cotta, while highly flexible and expressive, is a very fragile medium and as an architectural adornment (such as lunettes) vulnerable to the weather. Luca’s invention protected it from the elements.
[IMG]
[/IMG]
The glaze enabled Luca to decorate the outside of Florence’s fabulous Ospedale degli Innocenti (designed by Brunelleschi).
[IMG]
[/IMG]
Florence, during its days as a republic, built this home for babies whose mothers could not care for them, accepting them through a large “lazy susan” device...a kind of “drop-off center.” It is a touching reminder of Florence’s heart and symbolizes the increasingly humanistic and humanitarian outlook of the city during that time.
Luca’s sweetly envisaged medallions of the piccolini demonstrating the step by step method of swaddling infants so they would “grow straight” is part of that city’s feelings for those most in need, in this case the little abandoned babies....
[IMG]
[/IMG]
Luca has his rightful place in the masterpieces of the early Italian Renaissance for his lovely cantoria (choir loft) of singing, happy children which was in the duomo, now in its museum.
[IMG]
[/IMG]
Luca’s nephew, Andrea, continued and expanded the famed della Robbia workshop, teaching the “family recipe” to other budding sculptors, which lasted into the mid-1600s. Adapting the medieval technique of applying tin oxide glaze over clay, Luca developed a method for mixing the white opaque glaze with other powdered metals to produce brilliant colors and a durable surface. Some sources note that its clear glaze may have been fired over the colors to create the luminous finish that glowed, even in dimly lit interiors.
In the 16th century, della Robbias contributed the beautiful “street art” that you see in Florence’s neighborhoods even today. One of my favorites is the tabernacle of the fonticine (little fountains) by Giovanni della Robbia, Luca’s great nephew, in 1522, which you can see today on the Via Nazionale (now behind glass probably to protect it from pollution).
[IMG]
[/IMG]
Andrea’s workshop developed a range of offerings, expanded to include complex dramatic tableaux of figures, decorative architectural features, elaborate schemes for cupolas, family crests and coats of arms to an upscale market. Orders came in not only from Italy but also France, Spain, Portugal, Flanders and England.
And so here was an irony: seeing that their family name, derived from their dyer forebears (“robbia” referred to the ruby dye of the family’s fabric dyeing craft), the technical challenges presented by firing reds defeated the studio, preventing it from employing the color. So use of the color red had to be abandoned in the terra cottas.
The family business survived the madness of Savonarola by deftly modifying its “product line” to reflect the new austerity. Two of Andrea’s sons entered the San Marco convent and continued to make the tin glazed terra cottas for the order, gradually absorbing the Mannerist style more in line with the art of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto.
But eventually the family simply died out and, as Vasari updated his “Lives of the Artists” to note that “now art was deprived of the knowledge of the proper method of glazing.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thank you!
Shame about the red and the lost technique.
Makes me think of my departed uncle. A task like that would have intrigued him. He developed his own technique, toward the end, incorporating sand into bas-relief type stuff.
Never stop!
who you are...
