My first care was to seek expert confirmation of my theory; and as a step in this direction I made arrangements to have the groups of San Vivaldo photographed by Signor Alinari of Florence. I was obliged to leave Italy before the photographs could be taken; but on receiving them I sent them at once to Professor Ridolfi, who had listened with some natural incredulity to my description of the terra-cottas; and his reply shows that I had not overestimated the importance of the discovery.
“No sooner,” he writes, “had I seen the photographs than I became convinced of the error of attributing them to Giovanni Gonnelli, called Il Cieco di Gambassi. I saw at once that they are not the work of an artist of the seventeenth century, but of one living at the close of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century; of an artist of the school of the Robbias, who follows their precepts and possesses their style.... The figures are most beautifully grouped, and modelled with profound sentiment and not a little bravura. They do not appear to me to be all by the same author, for the Christ in the house of the Pharisee seems earlier and purer in style, and more robust in manner; also the swoon of the Madonna, ... which is executed in a grander style than the other reliefs and seems to belong to the first years of the sixteenth century.
“The fact that these terra-cottas are not glazed does not prove that they are not the work of the Robbia school; for Giovanni della Robbia, for example, sometimes left the flesh of his figures unglazed, painting them with the brush; and this is precisely the case in a Presepio of the National Museum” (this is the Presepio of San Vivaldo), “a work of the Robbias, in which the flesh is left unglazed.
“I therefore declare with absolute certainty that it is a mistake to attribute these beautiful works to Giovanni Gonnelli, and that they are undoubtedly a century earlier in date.”
SUB UMBRA LILIORUM
AN IMPRESSION OF PARMA
Parma, at first sight, lacks the engaging individuality of some of the smaller Italian towns. Of the romantic group of ducal cities extending from Milan to the Adriatic—Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Urbino—it is the least easy to hit off in a few strokes, to sum up in a sentence. Its component features, however interesting in themselves, fail to blend in one of those memorable wholes which take instant hold of the traveller’s imagination. The “sights” of Parma must be sought for; they remain separate isolated facts, and their quest is enlivened by few of those happy architectural incidents which give to a drive through Ferrara or Ravenna so fine a flavour of surprise.
A Characteristic Street
E. C. Peixotto
PARMA. 1901.