Description
TitleThe materiality of Luca della Robbia's glazed terracotta sculptures
Date Created2016
Other Date2016-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (xiii, 342 p. : ill.)
DescriptionThis dissertation examines the role of color, light, surface, and relief in relation to the novel medium of glazed terracotta sculpture developed by the Florentine artist Luca della Robbia (1399/1400-1482) during the 1430s and produced by his heirs until the midsixteenth century. Luca devised a tin glaze more brilliant, uniform, and opaque than any existing recipe which, applied to terracotta figures and decoration, produced an inimitable medium celebrated by his peers as an “invention”. In the last forty-five years, scholars have identified the resonances glazed terracotta sculpture held with valued media like marble, mosaic, and semiprecious stones. Yet new technical analysis of Della Robbia sculptures during the past three decades makes it possible to more precisely specify the possibilities – and thus the formal choices – available to Luca in relation to color, reflectivity, and relief in his distinctive new medium. Rooted in the physical qualities of glazed terracotta, this dissertation examines the artist’s choices in thematically organized chapters focused on invention, whiteness and light, color, and space. It argues that Luca’s engagement with color, relief, and reflectivity emphasized the materiality of his sculptures as tactile objects, placing them into productive tension with the illusionistic aims emerging in fifteenth-century Florentine art. Chapter One of the dissertation traces the development of a narrative of invention around Luca’s glazed terracotta sculpture, showing how contemporary audiences conceived the medium as both novel and related to existing arts of painting, sculpture, and fire. Chapter Two identifies the white bodies of Luca’s saints as a locus for perceiving effects of light that both modeled form and emphasized surface, materializing and dematerializing his subjects and contributing to an understanding of the ontology of holy figures, especially that of Christ as the Lux Mundi. Chapter Three contextualizes Luca’s negotiation of hue, tone, and saturation in his glazes in relation to available pigments and to the concerns recorded in treatises directed to painters and practitioners of the arts of fire. Finally, Chapter Four considers how Luca deployed relief, color, and composition in order to characterize the space of his glazed figures in relation to that of the viewer and to preexisting Florentine traditions.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Catherine Kupiec
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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