quality as similar works executed in marble; they can never give us the same sense of strength, of stability. And yet the aesthetic observer gets so much pleasure from the contemplation of these works of Luca that it seems ungracious to complain that. because of the defects of the medium, we do not get more.

Luca first employed glazed and painted terra cotta merely as a decorative accessory to sculpture. His tabernacle, now in the Collegiata at Peretola, is the earliest work in which he made use of earthenware the date of which is known. This tabernacle was made for the chapel of St. Luke in the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, Florence, in the year 1441. It was transported to the chapel belonging to the hospital in the remote Tuscan village in the seventeenth century—an age that was not in sympathy with the art of Luca. Only the angels' heads and the garlands on the frieze above, the base of the tabernacle, the background of the Pietà, and the spandrels of the roof, are decorated with coloured terra cotta of blue and white and green. These patches of colour and flimsy material do not accord well with the sculpturesque severity and dignity of the rest of the work.

Luca seems to have

realised that this attempt to combine glazed earthenware and marble was not altogether successful, for in his next important piece, the "Resurrection" of the Duomo, he employed terra cotta alone. This, though one of his earliest, is one of his finest works in this medium. In the whole of art there are few nobler conceptions of the Christ than in this relief. The figures, too, of the sleeping soldiers are admirably realised. This relief decorates the tympanum above the door of the Sagrestia Nuova. Above the door of the other sacristy, the Sagrestia Vecchia, is Luca's "Ascension," executed in 1446, three years after the Resurrection," a work not quite as fine in quality as the Resurrection," but which, nevertheless, takes rank with the best of Luca's reliefs. The groups of kneeling Apostles are admirably designed and the individual forms are well modelled.

Another important work of this period was the decoration of the Pazzi Chapel at S. Croce. There Luca co-operated with Filippo Brunelleschi to make one of the most beautiful works of the early Renaissance. The roof of the atrium, its frieze and architrave, the medallions of the four Evangelists on the interior of the ribbed dome, the frieze of lambs with the

medallions of the twelve Apostles underneath, combine to make a beautiful decoration to a beautiful building.

Some of Luca's most important works in glazed terra cotta are to be found in the little village of Impruneta, six miles south-west of Florence. There is kept the wonder-working image of the Virgin, which, in times of pestilence or other public calamity, it was customary to carry in procession to Florence. Near to the chapel which contains the sacred image is the Chapel of the Holy Cross. In both these chapels Luca again worked in collaboration with Michelozzo. The structure of both of the oratories and the tabernacle of the chapel of the Madonna, are by Michelozzo. The rest of the decoration of this chapel, internal and external, and the tabernacle and decorations of the other chapel of the Holy Cross, are by Luca. His most important work at the Impruneta is this last tabernacle, the tabernacle of the Sacrament, to give it its proper title. For the chapel was formerly dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament, and the relief of the "Crucifixion," now in an adjoining chapel, once occupied the place of the cupboard which the tabernacle now encloses. The relief was removed in the seventeenth century, and a portion of the Holy Cross was placed in the recess of the tabernacle where the "Crucifixion" had formerly stood.

We will consider the work in its original complete state. It is full alike of the merits and defects of Luca's work. The tabernacle itself is very inferior to the tabernacles of Luca's great collaborator Michelozzo. Elaborate decoration does not befit a framework of this kind, and we look in it, too, for more harmony of pattern and design than we find in this tabernacle, in which there is little artistic relation between the decorations of the frieze, the pilasters, and the base. With the tabernacle itself censorious criticism ceases. The statues that flank it, the "Crucifixion" it framed, and the angels on the relief below, are all worthy to rank with Luca's noblest works in glazed earthenware. The "Crucifixion " finely conveys to us the artist's emotions in contemplating the story of the Cross.

Some critics who imperfectly understand the psychology of art seem to think that to call a work of art emotional is to condemn it. Emotion that is either exhaustive, or shallow, or merely conventional and imitative, is certainly unsatisfactory whether in art or in life, but sincere and subtle emotion it is the first business of the artist to convey. Emotionless

art is a contradiction in terms, for art is primarily the ordered, rhythmic expression of emotion. Luca's treatment of the Crucifixion, therefore, is emotional. It is the veriest affectation to represent the Virgin or St. John, or the attendant angels as other than powerfully, nay, terribly moved at the sight of the Son of God in his death-agony, at the sight of their Lord crucified. To Luca, at least, the event was very real and terrible, and he has not shrunk from giving us his conception of it. Had it only been in sensitive marble instead of glazed earthenware, it would have been one of the most poignant as well as one of the noblest representations of the event that the world has seen. The difference between a marble statue and a glazed statue is the difference between the touch and appearance of an ungloved hand and a gloved hand. In Luca's own works the envelope is always thin, even, and of beautiful quality. But though the glove may be well-fitting and of fine material, we had rather see and touch a beautiful hand ungloved than gloved. Nevertheless in the presence of the masterpiece we forget the artist's mistake in the choice of his material. The fine but not too obtrusive modelling of the figures, the vitality and movement of the angels and the young St. John, the face of the Christ-all compel our enthusiastic admiration.

Beautiful, too, and light-poised, and swift in flight, are the angels that guard the shrine of the sacrament below the tabernacle. And "St. John the Baptist," and "St. Augustine," the finely-modelled figures who guard the tabernacle on either side, are full of noble solemnity as they contemplate the subject of the Crucifixion. Their calm is the calm of men who, whilst solemnized by the thought of mankind's sin and its penalty, know that the triumph of the Resurrection followed the Crucifixion. The emotion of the actual spectators of the event is also natural; in that they did not see the tragedy's victorious issue.

As I have only time to refer to two of Luca's Madonnas, I will choose the "Madonna of the Roses" and the "Madonna of the Cappella Bertolo," the first because it is one of the most characteristic of Luca's works, the second because it illustrates the transitional period of the art at the close of Luca's long life. The "Madonna of the Roses" is one of the most sympathetic of Luca's representations of the Virgin. It reminds us of the part that Luca played in the humanizing of the type of the Madonna. In his works, as in Fra Angelico's, we see a gradual progression. His concep

tion of the mother and the child becomes more and more human, tender, and pathetic without being less divine. The mother grows more maternal, the child more child-like, as his art advances. In the "Madonna of the Roses" the Virgin looks tenderly at the child as he plucks one of the flowers. There are representations of the Madonna of Luca's last period which are even more tender, more intimate than this. But stylistic as well as iconographical reasons make it impossible to agree with those critics who regard it as an early work. It belongs to the master's middle period, and is certainly later in date than the Urbino lunette. The Madonna of the Cappella Bertolo" is a work of the master's old age. Contemplative, and a little lacking in vitality and spontaneity, it has nevertheless the qualities of Luca's authenticated works. The frame of leaves and fruits, the background, the hands of the Almighty and the Holy Dove are the work of Andrea or some other assistant.

Luca's works in glazed earthenware have technical qualities which are not possessed by any other works of the class except those of Andrea's best period. In the first place, he uses a glaze of creamy whiteness, which is free from all impurities. Secondly, in his works the glaze is thinly and evenly distributed over the whole surface. Thirdly, he was careful in mixing and refining the paste of the body of his pieces. That the surface of his glaze is free from bubbles or spots is not entirely due to the quality of the glaze, as some of his biographers have stated who are not sufficiently acquainted with the technique of the process. It is due, in a measure, to the fact that the body was made of selected clay, well washed, beaten, and kneaded, and freed from all impurities. Fourthly, he is scrupulously careful in other matters of detail, in the joinings of the different parts of his relief, in his frames of fruits and leaves. There is no merely mechanical work. In the borders of his stemmi we find that he never repeated a section. He was never content with merely mechanical reproduction.

Andrea della Robbia was born in the year 1433. During his early years he was an assistant of his uncle Luca, and was always strongly influenced by him. But he was no mere imitator. He had a distinct artistic personality, which revealed itself long before Luca's death; and perhaps, for his genius, glazed earthenware was a more suitable means of expression than it proved to be in the case of Luca. His

earliest independent works are the decora tions of the Loggia of the Hospital of the Innocents, which were executed between the years 1463 and 1465 when Andrea was thirty years old. While he was at work upon them, he married a young Florentine girl, who bore him three children before she was twenty-one years old. Let us hope that they were as charming as his earlier offspring, the lovely infants that still look down upon us from the façade of the Innocenti. No more tender, more poignant, more intimate representations of childhood are to be found in the whole range of art than these babies, who for four and a half centuries have pleaded for alms to those who have passed along the piazza to the church dedicated to the Virgin of the Annunciation.

Andrea della Robbia is best studied at La Verna. There are no less than fifteen works of the Robbia family in the great hill-set convent redolent with memories of St. Francis of Assisi. Amongst them are four masterpieces of Andrea. Perhaps the most perfect of them is the "Madonna of the Girdle," executed about the year 1480. The Virgin has that charming, essentially feminine and maternal character which we see in all his representations of her. Below the Madonna kneel the four noble figures, St. Thomas, St. Gregory, St. Bonaventura, and St. Francis. The predella is an imitation, but an artistic, not a slavish imitation, of the predella of the tabernacle of the Holy Cross at Impruneta, which I have lately described. The St. Thomas is one of the most finely realised, finely executed figures in the whole range of the art of the Robbia.

A stronger but more faulty work is Andrea's colossal "Crucifixion," in the chapel of the Stigmata. In this work, the introduction of colour in the glaze of the central figure is a distinct mark of decadence. But the "Crucifixion" of La Verna is a later work of Andrea. Some of the pieces that he executed immediately after completing his earlier masterpieces at La Verna are amongst the best of his works."The Madonna and Saints" in the Cappella Medici at Santa Croce is known to every visitor to Florence. The faces of the saints, so full of devotion and tenderness, are most delicately modelled. The St. Francis is a finely realised figure, full of pathos and character. The frieze decorated with cherubs' heads, too, contrasts pleasantly with the solemnity of the Virgin and the attendant saints.

A fine work of Andrea, which has suffered very unkind treatment, is the "Madonna of the Architects," in the Museo Nazionale. The group of the Virgin and Child is amongst the best of the master's works. In feeling, in design, and in its technical qualities, it recalls Luca's own work, and especially his two little Madonnas at the Impruneta. But it has a very heavy, ill-designed frame, and is placed in an unsuitable position in the Museo Nazionale. Perhaps the most distracting feature of the small tabernacle are the heads of cherubs on the inside, which very much mar the effect of the central group. It seems to me that

this frame was made at a later date than the Madonna by Giovanni della Robbia.

With Andrea the decline of the art began. In his later years he employed many assistants, who repeated his designs, and often executed slovenly work of the poorest technical quality. In place of the fine, flawless, creamcoloured glaze of Luca, and of such works of Andrea as the Madonna della Cintola at La Verna, we get a white glaze of poor quality, whose surface is coarsened by specks of dust or grit, by bubbles and flaws. Consummate artist as he was, Andrea degraded his art by sending from his crowded bottega cheap, hurried work in response to a popular demand. Under his son Giovanni its degradation became complete.

Giovanni della Robbia, the third son of Andrea, was born in 1469. He was not without ability or even genius; but he was commercially minded, and without artistic conscience. He loved crude, loud effects; and when once he ceased to imitate his father, he showed a tendency towards unrestrained realism, and a love for bizarre effects of colour. In some respects he was the very antithesis of his father. In place of Andrea's sympathetic, tender, gentle art, with its beautiful representations of motherhood and childhood, we are given work which is full of types whose chief quality is their rude strength. His lack of artistic conscience led him to neglect the careful preparation of the clay and the glaze, to admit mechanical repetitions of patterns and sections of patterns, and to be careless in putting together the component parts of a relief or an altar piece. In his later period, in place of the white glaze he adopted glazes of various colours, and in his latest work substituted oil paint for glaze. His object seems to have been to obtain a striking effect with as little labour as possible. Nevertheless, Giovanni, in spite of his failings, succeeded in

producing a few works of high artistic quality; and, in using glazed earthenware for purely architectural decoration, he was working on right lines. His masterpieces were his earliest independent work and his latest, the lavabo of S. Maria Novella, and the frieze of the Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoja.

The lavabo is a work of singular charm, a graceful composition in which colour is used judiciously. Every part of it is well designed, the frieze, the reliefs on the pilaster, the beautiful painted landscape, and the font below. Moreover the lavabo is admirably adapted for its purpose. In this work, which is proved by documentary evidence to be from Giovanni's hand, the master excels both as a painter and a sculptor. Giovanni affords a striking example of the ineffectiveness of high artistic gifts when they are not combined with an exigent taste and a sensitive artistic conscience.

His tabernacle in the Via Nazionale at Florence shows to what depths he was capable of sinking. An over-crowded, ill-composed piece, tawdry and inharmonious in colour, and vulgar in sentiment, there it has stood in the public street for well-nigh four centuries, testifying to the degradation of its author.

In his last known work this surprising artist succeeded in getting out of himself another masterpiece. The decoration of the Ospedale del Ceppo has certain obvious faults. Neither the design nor the colour-scheme is harmonious, and yet the work as a whole is effective. The actual execution is by more than one hand, but the whole credit of the design may, I think, be given to Giovanni della Robbia. The chief element of the decorative scheme is a frieze consisting of seven reliefs representing the seven corporal works of mercy, with one of the seven cardinal virtues dividing each of the reliefs from its neighbours.

The treatment of the subject is singularly realistic. In the "Clothing of the Naked" we note the fine modelling of the half-nude figures to the left, and in the Visiting the Prisoners" we also note some finely realised figures. No photographic reproduction of parts of the design can give any idea of the rich, bizarre, finely barbaric effect of the whole work.

Giovanni died in the year 1529, only a year after his father, who lived to the age of ninety. Andrea's youngest son, Girolamo, lived for the greater part of his artistic career in France, and of his great work, the Château de Madrid, a building entirely encrusted with glazed and

coloured earthenware, only a few fragments remain.

66

Among the many assistants of the Della Robbia who were not of their family, the name of the most important that has reached us is that of Benedetto Buglioni. Vasari mentions him in his "Life of Verrocchio" as a worker in glazed terra cotta, who had learnt his secret from a woman of the family of Andrea della Robbia. The researches of Milanesi demonstrated that he was an assistant of Giovanni della Robbia, and that he executed independent works in Florence, Genoa, Perugia, and Pistoja. In Pistoja one of his pieces remains, a "Coronation of the Virgin," over the entrance of the chapel of the hospital. In Florence, on the façade of the church of Ognissanti, is a tympanum decorated with a large relief of the Coronation," a work known to all visitors to the city. This relief is now given to Buglioni, because of the strong similarity the principal group bears to the lunette at Pistoja. The resemblances are numerous and obvious— so obvious that it would be mere useless pedantry to detail them. And yet I am not convinced that the relief on the Ognissanti is by Buglioni. The composition at Pistoja consists only of the two principal figures, and of eleven cherubs' heads. At the Ognissanti we see a choir of angels round about the Christ and the Virgin, and below them a row of seven saints. Both the angels and the saints are most characteric works of Giovanni della Robbia. So obviously is this the case that it would again be mere pedantry to make a list of morphological similarities to his work. Is it likely that if Giovanni had executed all the subordinate figures, he would have entrusted the principal figures to an assistant ? I think not. Moreover, the principal figures are obviously by the same hand as the rest of the piece. I conclude that this "Coronation" of the Ognissanti is by Giovanni della Robbia, and that Buglioni's lunette at Pistoja is a pupil's free copy of his master's work.

During the period of the Della Robbia, a period of a hundred years, from the year 1430 to 1529, the date of Giovanni's death, majolica in the ordinary sense of the term was doubtless produced in Florence. But neither documentary evidence nor the evidence of signed pieces points to the conclusion that the local fabbriche were of great importance. Della Robbia themselves made, as we have seen, a decorative use of painted tiles and plaques of glazed earthenware, large and

The

small. Criticism no longer allows that the paintings of the "Months" in the Victoria and Albert Museum are by Luca. But the border of the Tomb of Benozzo Federighi" is composed of tiles decorated with beautiful paintings of flowers-lilies and roses and marigolds, and on the base of the tabernacle of the Sacrament at the Impruneta, are groups of pine-cones and leaves from Luca's brush. Giovanni, as we have already seen, decorated the lavabo of S. Maria Novello with a landscape painted with singular mastery on a large tile. It is strange that with such influences at work in Florence the art of majolica did not develop more rapidly. That Florence was not, at the close of the fifteenth century, a great and progressive centre of the art is demonstrated, not only by the fact that there is scarcely one important piece of that period that was indisputably executed in Florence; but also by the solicitude of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a cousin of the great Lorenzo, to establish artistic potteries in the city by importing artists from other towns. The fabbrica | he founded was soon removed to Cafaggiolo, and Florence did not become a place of importance in the history of ceramics until the new porcelain was made there in the days of the Duke Francesco.

Miscellaneous.

GLACIER-BURSTS.*

Glaciers give rise to torrential phenomena known by the name of “ débâcles," or glacier-bursts, the geological importance of which has hitherto been insufficiently recognised.

The production of an outburst depends on the prior creation of a reservoir of water and its sudden discharge. The creation of this reservoir may be the result of an advance or retreat of the glacier, which has the effect of stopping the outflow of the waters into a thalweg; it may equally be the consequence of the present state of the glaciation, which may permanently block the valley. Lastly, the body of water necessary to the production of an outburst may be formed either above or below the glacier, or even within its thickness. When the barrier of ice yields the outburst takes place, and its violence is proportional to the cubic contents of the reservoir and the

⚫ Abstract of a paper read by Charles Rabot before Section E of the British Association at Cambridge.

slope of the ground over which the inundation passes. In the Alps, twenty-five glaciers have been the scene of outbursts, either singly or in series, whose causes are matter of knowledge, but many others have pro. duced inundations whose mode of origin has escaped observation. The total number is certainly much greater, but only the most destructive have been recorded prior to 1892, the date of the Saint Gervais catastrophe.

These torrential phenomena occur in all the glaciated mountain regions of the world-in Norway, Iceland, Spitsbergen (where Sir Martin Conway and Mr. E. J. Garwood have noted their effects), in Greenland, Alaska, and, lastly, in the Himalayas. In the last-named region English travellers, like Col. Godwin-Austen, Sir Martin Conway, and Professor Norman Collie, have collected valuable data bearing on this phenomenon. In the Alps, the voluine of water precipitated in the case of destructive outbursts may reach several million cubic metres, and this enormous liquid mass may flow away in a few hours over steeply sloping ground. In 1878, the Marjelensee discharged 7,700,000 cubic metres in nine hours, and the Gietroz outburst in 1818 attained a volume of 530 million cubic feet.

Such a mass of water moving at an enormous speed has an important erosive effect, and modifies the contours of the valley along which it takes its course. On the other hand, it carries with it enormous masses of material, and, frequently, large numbers of trees. All these débris are afterwards deposited in the locality, where a diminution of the angle of slope brings about a reduction in the rate of flow. Thus, in valleys visited by frequent catastrophes, we may say that the glacial deposits of the present day, or of Pleistocene age, have been, and are still being, shifted and rearranged throughout the whole of the zone affected by these wild waters. Similar inundations must necessarily have been very frequent during the glacial epoch, and frequent mistakes must have been made in studying the Pleistocene formations through not taking account of these phenomena. Still, we must not go too far and exaggerate the action of glacier outbursts. Their effects are at the present day limited to the sides of the thalwegs, and the same must have been the case during the Quaternary period.

ELECTRIC WAVES, AND WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY.*

This paper is concerned with an experimental and theoretical treatment of the propagation of electric waves along spiral wires. The subject has engaged the attention of several physicists. Hertz has described an experiment in which he established

Abstract of a paper read by J. A. Fleming, M.A., D.Sc. F.R.S., before Section A of the British Association at Cambridge.