Spencer Alley: Vasari Compares Reliefs by della Robbia and Donatello

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Vasari Compares Reliefs by della Robbia and Donatello

Luca della Robbia
Singing Gallery (detail of frieze)
ca. 1431-38
marble relief
Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence

Luca della Robbia
Singing Gallery
ca. 1431-38
marble
Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence

"The locus classicus for this observation in the late Italian Renaissance is to be found in Vasari's life of Luca della Robbia. Vasari there contrasts the two Singing Galleries for the Florentine cathedral, done respectively by Luca [above] and by Donatello [below]. . . . Luca's work, we hear, was very neatly finished, but Donatello had proceeded with more judgment. 'He left it rough and unfinished,' wrote Vasari, 'so that from a distance it looked much better than Luca's; though Luca's is made with good design and diligence, its polish and refinement cause the eye from a distance to lose it and not to make it out as well as that by Donatello, which is hardly more than roughed out. Artists should pay much attention to this, for experience shows that all things which are far removed, be they paintings, sculptures, or whatever, have more beauty and greater force when they are a beautiful sketch [una bella bozza] than when they are finished. And quite apart from the distance which has this effect, it also frequently appears in sketches which arise all of a sudden in the frenzy of art that expresses the idea in a few strokes, while a laboured effect and too much industry sometimes deprive of force and skill those who cannot ever leave their hand from the work they are doing'."

"Vasari's account is so interesting because it shows his awareness of the link between the imagination of the artist and that of the public. Only works that are created in a state of heightened imagination, he said in effect, will appeal to the imagination. In the context of Renaissance theories and prejudices, insistence on inspiration and imagination goes hand in hand with emphasis on art as the high intellectual activity and the rejection of mere menial skill. Careful finish betrays the artisan who has to observe the standards of the guild. The true artist, like the true gentleman, will work with ease. This is Castiglione's famous doctrine of sprezzatura, the nonchalance which marks the perfect courtier and the perfect artist."

– E.H. Gombrich, from Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960 – an expanded version of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1956)