Patron and artist grew old together, and Cosimo took such care of the sculptor that Donatello rarely thought about money. He kept his funds, says Vasari, in a basket suspended from the ceiling of his studio, and bade his aides and friends take from it according to their needs, without consulting him. When Cosimo was dying (1464) he recommended Donatello to the care of his son Piero; Piero gave the old artist a house in the country, but Donatello soon returned to Florence, preferring his accustomed studio to the sunshine and insects of the countryside. He lived in simplicity and content till the age of eighty. All the artists—nearly all the people—of Florence joined in the funeral that laid him to rest, as he had asked, in the crypt of San Lorenzo, beside Cosimo’s own tomb (1466).
He had immeasurably advanced the sculptural art. Now and then he poured too much force into his poses and designs; often he fell short of the finished form that exalts Ghiberti’s doors. But his faults were due to his resolve to express not beauty so much as life, not merely a strong and healthy body but a complex character or mental state. He developed sculptural portraiture by extending it from the religious to the secular field, and by giving his subjects an unprecedented variety, individuality, and power. Overcoming a hundred technical difficulties, he created the first great equestrian statue left to us by the Renaissance. Only one sculptor would reach greater heights, and then by inheriting what Donatello had learned, achieved, and taught. Bertoldo was Donatello’s pupil, and the teacher of Michelangelo.
3. Luca della Robbia
The picture that takes form in our minds, as we read Vasari’s biographies of Ghiberti and Donatello, shows the studio of a Renaissance sculptor as the co-operative enterprise of many hands, directed by one mind, but transmitting the art, day by day, from master to apprentice, generation after generation. From such studios came minor sculptors who left to history a less imperious fame, but in their degree contributed to give to passing beauty a lasting form. Nanni di Banco inherited a fortune, and had the means to be worthless; but he fell in love with sculpture and Donatello, and served a faithful apprenticeship under him until he could set up his own studio. He carved a St. Philip for the niche of the shoemakers’ guild in Or San Michele, and for the cathedral a St. Luke seated with the Gospel in his hand, and looking out with all the confidence of fresh faith upon a Renaissance Italy just beginning to doubt.
In another studio the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino combined their skills in architecture and sculpture. Bernardo designed a classic tomb in Santa Croce for Leonardo Bruni; then, on the accession of Nicholas V he went to Rome, and consumed himself in the great Pope’s architectural revolution. Antonio reached his zenith at thirty-four (1461) with his marble tomb in San Miniato, at Florence, for Don Jayme, Cardinal of Portugal; here is the victory of the classic style in all but the angel’s wings, the Cardinal’s vestments, and his crown of virginity—for James had startled his time by his chastity. America has two lovely examples of Antonio’s work—the marble bust of The Christ Child in the Morgan Library, and The Young St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery. And is there anywhere a nobler example of realistic portraiture than the powerful head—corrugated with veins and furrowed with thought—of the physician Giovanni di San Miniato, in the Victoria and Albert Museum?
Desiderio da Settignano came to Florence from the nearby village that gave him his cognomen. He joined Donatello’s staff, saw that the master’s work lacked only patient finish, and distinguished his own productions with elegance, simplicity, and grace. His tomb for Marsuppini did not quite equal Rossellino’s for Bruni, but the tabernacle that he designed for the church of San Lorenzo (1464) pleased all who saw it; and his incidental portraits* and reliefs augmented his fame. He died at thirty-six; what might he have done if given, like his master, eighty years?
Luca della Robbia was granted eighty-two, and used them well; he raised terra-cotta work almost to the level of a major art, and his fame out-journeyed Donatello’s; there is hardly a museum in Europe that does not display the tenderness of his Madonnas, the cheerful blue and white of his painted clay. Beginning as a goldsmith like so many artists of the Renaissance, and learning in that minuscule field all the delicacies of design, he passed on to sculptural relief, and carved five marble plaques for Giotto’s Campanile. Perhaps the wardens of the cathedral did not tell Luca that these reliefs excelled Giotto’s, but they soon commissioned him to adorn the organ loft with a relief picturing choir boys and girls in the ecstasy of song. Two years later (1433) Donatello carved a similar Cantoria. The rival reliefs now face each other in the Opera di duomo or Works of the Cathedral; both of them powerfully convey the exuberant vitality of childhood; here the Renaissance rediscovered children for art. In 1446 the wardens engaged him to make reliefs for the bronze doors of a cathedral sacristy. These could not rival Ghiberti’s but they saved Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life in the Pazzi conspiracy. All Florence now acclaimed Luca as a master.
So far he had followed the traditional methods of the sculptor’s art. Meanwhile, however, he had been experimenting with clay, seeking to find a way in which this tractable material could be made as beautiful in texture as marble. He molded the clay into the form designed, covered it with a glaze of divers chemicals, and baked it in a specially constructed kiln. The wardens admired the result, and commissioned him to place terra-cotta representations of the Resurrection and the Ascension over the doors of the cathedral sacristies (1443, 1446). These tympanums, though in monochrome white, made a stir by the novelty of their material and the refinement of their finish and design. Cosimo and his son Piero ordered similar terra cottas for the Medici palace and for Piero’s chapel in San Miniato; in these Luca added blue to the dominant white. Orders came to him now in an abundance that tempted him to rapid facility. He brightened with a terra-cotta Coronation of the Virgin the portal of the church of the Ognissanti, and the portal of the Badia with a tenderly graceful Madonna and Child, between such angels as might reconcile us to an eternity of heaven. For the church of San Giovanni in Pistoia he attempted a large terra-cotta Visitation; it was a fresh departure in the aged features of Elizabeth and the youthful innocence and diffidence of Mary. So Luca created a new realm of art, and founded a della Robbia dynasty that would flourish till the end of the century.