Lorenzo are not altogether worthy of him, are perhaps the work of a man who is losing his sight and is already a little dependent on his pupils.  One of these, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who died in 1491, has left us a beautiful relief of a battle, now in the Bargello, and later we catch a glimpse of him in the garden of Lorenzo’s villa directing the studies in art of a number of young people, among whom was the youthful Michelangelo.  But of the real disciples of Donatello, those who, without necessarily being his pupils, carried his art a step farther, we know nothing.  His influence seems to have died with him.  Tuscan art after his death, and even before that, had already set out on another road than his.

Something of that expressiveness, that intimite, which Pater found so characteristic of Luca della Robbia, seems to have inspired all the sculptors of the fifteenth century save Donatello himself.  Not vitality merely, but a wonderful sort of expressiveness—­it is the mood of all their work.  It is perhaps in Luca della Robbia and his school that we first come upon this strange sweetness, which is really a sort of clairvoyance, as it were, to the passing aspect of the world, of men, of the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them.  What the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturalness in sculpture, as though the god were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in Luca’s work like a new wild flower.  Expression, life, the power to express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, these are what he really discovered, and not the mere material of his art, that painted earthenware, as Vasari supposes.

Of his two great works in marble, the tomb of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole, at San Miniato, and the Cantoria for the Duomo, of his bronze doors for the sacristy there, and his work on the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; but here in the Bargello, and all over Tuscany too, you may see those terra-cotta reliefs of Madonna, of the Annunciation, of the Birth of our Lord, painted first just white, and then blue and white, and later with many colours which are peculiar to him and his school—­could such flower-like things have been born anywhere but in Italy?—­and then, if you take them away they fade in the shadows of the North.

Among the first to give Luca commissions for this exquisite work in clay was Piero de’ Medici.  For him Luca decorated a small book-lined chamber in the great Medici palace that Cosimo had built.  His work was for the ceiling and the pavement, the ceiling being a half sphere.  For the hot summer days of Italy, when the streets are a blaze of light and the sun seems to embrace the city, this terra-cotta work with its cool whites and blues, was particularly delightful bringing really, as it were, something of the cool morning sea, the soft sky, into a place