But in his nobler
terra-cotta work he never introduces colour into the flesh, keeping
mostly to blue and white, the colours of the Virgin Mary.
I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual
measure that special characteristic which belongs to all the workmen of
his school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positive
information about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen
themselves very near to us--the impress of a personal quality, a
profound expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which is
meant some subtler sense of originality--the seal on a man's work of
what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of
apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest
intensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still
in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially,
perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes works in the imaginative
and moral order really worth having at all.
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