The Early Renaissance


 

Giovanni della Robbia


Girolamo della Robbia

 

della Robbia
 

Italian family of sculptors and potters.
They were active in Florence from the early 15th century and elsewhere in Italy and France well into the 16th. Family members were traditionally employed in the textile industry, and their name derives from rubia tinctorum, a red dye. Luca della Robbia founded the family sculpture workshop in Florence and was regarded by contemporaries as a leading artistic innovator, comparable to Donatello and Masaccio. The influence of antique art and his characteristic liveliness and charm are evident in such works as the marble singing-gallery for Florence Cathedral. He is credited with the invention of the tin-glazed terracotta sculpture for which the family became well known. His nephew Andrea della Robbia, who inherited the workshop, tended to use more complex compositions and polychrome glazing rather than the simple blue-and-white schemes favoured by his uncle. Several of Andrea’s sons worked in the shop. Marco della Robbia (b 6 April 1468; d 1529–34), perhaps the least talented of the sons, became a Dominican monk in 1496 but continued to execute sculpture, e.g. the lunette of the Annunciation (1510–15; Lucca, S Frediano). Andrea’s sons Giovanni della Robbia and Luca della Robbia the younger (b 25 Aug 1475; d before 6 Nov 1548) inherited the workshop and were responsible for adapting its production to 16th-century taste, influenced by contemporary Florentine painting. Another son, Francesco della Robbia (b 23 July 1477; d 1527–8) joined the Dominican convent of S Marco in Florence in 1495 but maintained links with the family shop. His work included plastic groups such as the Nativity of Santo Spirito in Siena (1504), and terracotta altarpieces, some executed in collaboration with his brother Marco. In the 1520s Marco and Francesco spent some time in the Marches, near Macerata, where they realized numerous glazed terracotta works. Girolamo della Robbia was the only son of Andrea to continue the reputation of the family’s terracotta works beyond the mid-16th century. He spent much of his life in France, working for the royal court, often in collaboration with Luca the younger, who joined him there in 1529. 

Giovanni della Robbia

(b Florence, 19 May 1469; d ?Florence, 14 July 1529–24 March 1530).

Son of Andrea della Robbia. He trained with his father and is documented in the family workshop from 1487, where he collaborated on projects including the marble altar of S Maria delle Grazie in Arezzo (1487–93). By c. 1495 he also worked independently. His first documented work, the lavabo in the sacristy of S Maria Novella (Florence), completed in 1498, already shows his characteristic decorative exuberance and it has a particularly beautiful river landscape painted in the lunette. Giovanni’s individual style is more apparent in two altarpieces for the convent of S Girolamo in Volterra (Last Judgement, 1501, and St Francis Giving the Rule to St Louis and St Elizabeth of Hungary), in which the figures are very lively. He also produced decorative jars, vases and stemmi, for example 36 jars ordered for the hospital of S Maria Nuova, Florence, of which one example is known (1507; Sèvres, Mus. N. Cer.).