American Point Line.. American Point Body.. American Point Set
THE DELLA ROBBIA SERIES
For a Complete Showing, see the following page

TWELVE
POINT
SPECIMEN
ll)ti

ABOUT THE DELLA ROBBIA SERIES OF TYPES
BORDERS AND ORNAMENTS SHOWN ON THE
FIRST SEVEN PAGES OF THIS SPECIMEN BOOK
UCA DELLA ROBBIA was a sculptor of
Florence, in the time when Florence was the
garden of the world. He was born in the
year 1400, and is the greatest of a long family
of artisans who carried out with but slight
variation, and slight inferiority, the traditions he established.
Q Becoming weary with the limitations of the hard marble
in which he began to work, his genius burst into the inven-
tion of a broader and readier means of expression for itself in
the form of a kind of glazed white pottery-ware with which
his name became generally identified and to which he justly
owes his fame. To the bas-reliefs executed in this material
it became possible for Luca to contribute a little coloring,
invariably a soft blue tint in the backgrounds, just like the sky
beneath which he worked, and never with the weak motive
of reproducing the colors of the objects which he modeled, but
for pure love of color itself. About the artistic and delicate
groups in the center of these relief panels (quite naturally reli-
gious in subjed and far beyond the scope of this writing), ading
as a sort of architedural foundation or framework to them, he
wrought decorations of fruit and flowers and a great variety of
quaint conceits with luxurious and almost inexhaustible charm.
q But most interesting to our purpose was his use of the simple
and beautifully proportioned roman letters which came to play
so important a part in the decorative portions of Luca's work,
and in that of his successors. No other sculptor of his glorious
time seemed to understand the value of the roman charaders,
or to delight in their use, with quite such a perfedt facility for
combining them with appropriate and harmonious decoration.
Q And it is this particular phase of his work, this simple and
ingenious combination of ornament and lettering, which has
suggested the present showing, of which in this point we be-
lieve the Della Robbia is the richest and most representative.

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