By Laura Beach
BOSTON, MASS. — Many a visitor to a great American museum has wandered into a gallery of European art, glanced up and been utterly struck by the beauty of an Italian terracotta defying classification. The medium, of course, is clay; the rendering, sculptural. The luminous palette, striking in its lead- and tin-rich glazes of celestial blues and milky whites, has the depth, gloss and constancy of paint, yet the purpose of the piece is architectural.
Chances are this masterpiece of Renaissance ceramic art was made by a member of the Della Robbia family or by one of their Florentine contemporaries. Their lives and oeuvre are the subject of the much-praised exhibition “Della Robbia: Sculpting With Color In Renaissance Florence.” On view through December 4 at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, the show presents 46 freestanding sculptures and architectural elements gathered from more than two dozen public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Six pivotal loans — among them “The Visitation” of 1445, from the Church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia — traveled from Italy and are seen in the United States for the first time. John Singer Sargent sketched “The Visitation,” which probably served as inspiration for his Boston Public Library murals.
Marietta Cambareri, a curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at the MFA, organized the exhibition and is the catalog’s principal author. The present project, whose origins date to 2004, grew out of her research into a Sixteenth Century Florentine glazed terracotta sculpture, now attributed to Giovanni Francesco Rustici, of St John the Baptist in the MFA’s collection. New scholarship on materials and techniques by MFA conservator Abigail Hykin and research scientists Richard Newman and Michele Derrick prompted the team to delve more deeply into a subject first taken up in the United States roughly a century ago, when Allan Marquand published his 1912 monograph, Della Robbias in America.
Luca della Robbia, the clan’s patriarch, was born in Florence around 1400. From a family of artisans, he established himself as a sculptor by 1431. A decade later, in his first documented use of glazed terracotta, he finished a tabernacle for the church of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Writing about Luca more than a century later, art historian Giorgio Vasari acknowledged the sculptor’s originality and influence, insisting that no follower of the Della Robbia had surpassed the perfection of his durable, colorful creations. Luca, who died in 1482, was succeeded by his nephew and principal collaborator, Andrea della Robbia (1435–1525), who in turn passed the tradition to his sons Giovanni (1469–1529/30), Luca the Younger (1475–1548), Marco (1468–1534) and Girolamo (1488–1566). Another son, Francesco (1477–1527/28), continued the tradition in France. Rivals to the Della Robbia included Benedetto Buglioni (1459/60–1521), who may have trained in Andrea’s workshop; Santi Buglioni (1494–1576), a distant relative adopted by Benedetto in 1513; and Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474–1554), a presumed nobleman who enjoyed Medici patronage.
The fashion for glazed terracotta sculpture faded in Italy a century after Luca della Robbia took Florence by storm. Cambareri writes that the decline “was accompanied by a decisive shift in the Sixteenth Century away from the use of color in sculpture, as marble became the preferred medium, thanks to the overwhelming influence of Michelangelo, who also disparaged the act of modeling in clay. As the century progressed, bronze statuary became more important as well, as demonstrated by the virtuosity of sculptors like Benvenuto Cellini and Giambologna.”
While supremely innovative, Florentine glazed terracotta sculpture also reflected the Renaissance interest in antiquity. Luca and his contemporaries were likely aware of from Classical authors such as Pliny the Elder that Greek and Roman sculpture was sometimes painted. Floral garlands, baskets of fruit, decorated urns and portrait busts, all prominently featured in the exhibition, take their cues from the ancients.
The Della Robbia and their contemporaries made glazed terracotta for public and private commissions alike, their work ornamenting structures both secular and divine. The Madonna and Child relief was the most common subject for Renaissance domestic sculpture, says Cambareri, who selected examples from the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, National Gallery of Art and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence for the exhibition. From the collections of the MFA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, versions of Luca della Robbia’s “Madonna of the Niche” are shown adjacent to one another. Florentines also liked representations of St John the Baptist, the city’s patron saint, and figures of Dovizia (Abundance) and Judith, well-known from public sculptures by Donatello.
At least as interesting as the Fifteenth Century embrace of Florentine glazed terracotta sculpture is its rediscovery by English and American scholars and collectors in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. One of the gems of the show is “The Adoration of the Child.” Attributed to Andrea della Robbia, it is thought to date from after 1477. John Ruskin originally considered glazed terracotta sculpture “vulgar,” but changed his mind. After acquiring the relief, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1877, he hung it above the mantel in his study, declaring it “quite one of the most precious things I have.”
London’s South Kensington Museum, called the Victoria and Albert Museum today, was among the first Anglophone institutions to collect works by the Della Robbia, an endorsement that carried great weight across the Atlantic. The MFA’s first honorary director, Charles Callahan Perkins, donated three Della Robbia sculptures to the museum upon its opening in 1876. In his guide to the MFA’s collections, published the following year, Thomas Gold Appleton observed that the museum’s “Majolica and Robbia ware,” among other ceramics, were “the passion, as well as the fashion of the hour.”
Among other American enthusiasts were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose 1878 poem “Keramos” includes a tribute to Luca della Robbia; Boston collectors Quincy Adams Shaw and Isabella Stewart Gardner; New York collectors Henry G. Marquand and Benjamin Altman; and Baltimore collector Henry Walters. So widespread was the interest in Italian Renaissance art in general and glazed terracotta sculpture in particular that New York’s Vanderbilt Hotel christened a space decorated with terracotta tiles the “Della Robbia Bar” in 1912 and architect Julia Morgan created the “Della Robbia Room” for William Randolph Hearst’s castle in San Simeon, Calif.
Of course, disreputable fakes and honest reproductions abounded. In 1900, art expert Bernard Berenson informed his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner that “of a hundred ‘della Robbias,’ at least 95 are modern forgeries, and the rest neither Lucas nor Andreas, and relatively worthless.” At the height of the early Twentieth Century collecting craze, Americans who could not afford an original Della Robbia often bought marked pieces made in the Florence shops of Cantagalli or Ginori. “These manufacturers had developed a glazing technique that reproduced the pure, opaque colors and hard, shiny surfaces that characterized the original Renaissance works,” writes the curator. Acquired by a Massachusetts family around 1912, about two years after it was made by the Cantagalli workshop, “The Virgin Adoring the Child,” modeled after a work by Andrea della Robbia, is included in the show.
Related Programs
A two-part course on Della Robbia sculpture is planned for September 20 and 27. The first session will examine the influence of sculptors such as Donatello and Luca della Robbia on painters and other artists. In part two, conservators from the MFA Boston and the Brooklyn Museum will survey the materials and techniques used in glazed terracotta sculpture and offer thoughts on conservation approaches. Also planned is an October 16 lecture by Marietta Cambareri, whose talk, titled “Della Robbia Sculpture: Renaissance Invention/Modern Rediscovery,” will consider the contributions of the Renaissance workshop and its more recent reappraisal.
Catalog
Published by MFA Boston and distributed by Artbook and Thames & Hudson, Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence is by Marietta Cambareri with contributions by Abigail Hykin and Courtney Leigh Harris. The book combines archival images and views of architectural installations with arresting color plates of individual sculptures. Topics explored include the Della Robbia family, its signature innovations, the family’s place in Renaissance Florence, and the influence of antiquity on the Della Robbia and their artistic peers. The catalog concludes with a discussion of materials and techniques, artists’ biographies, notes and a select bibliography.
Following its close in Boston, the show travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington from February 5 to June 4.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is on Avenue of the Arts at 465 Huntington Avenue. For information,www.mfa.org or 617-267-9300.
