Art: Plaque

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Director William Mathewson Milliken of the Cleveland Museum of Art gloated last week in the thought that he had been able to purchase the first original marble by Luca Delia Robbia ever to enter this country.

At one period no U. S. tourist returned from Italy without a copy of one of the blue and white Delia Robbia bambini which decorate the façade of the Florentine Foundling Hospital. Their designer was not Cleveland's Luca Delia Robbia (1400-82), but his prolific nephew, Andrea. Luca, however, perfected the enamel-coated terra cotta ware of which they are made. A suave sculptor, he lacked the virility of his great contemporaries (Verrocchio, Donatello) but had an able talent, designed a number of pieces beloved by romantics. His greatest was the series of singing angels and dancing boys which form the "singing gallery" in the choir of Florence's striped cathedral. Little of his original sculpture exists, for Luca, his nephew Andrea's five sons spent most of their time making Delia Robbia ware: lunettes, busts, plaques, friezes, fountains, lavatories. Shiploads of these copies remain. So much Delia Robbia ware is assembled in the Florentine Bargello that the third floor looks like one interminable bathroom.

Cleveland's plaque, not terra cotta but marble, was discovered and owned originally by a Parisian antiquary and art critic named Eugene Piot. In 1864 Critic Piot sold it to a fellow pamphleteer, Charles Timbal. During the post-war depression of 1870, the entire Timbal collection went to Gustave Dreyfus, a French engineer who made money out of the Suez Canal. In its turn the Dreyfus collection went up for auction in Paris. It was bought in its entirety by Sir Joseph Duveen. The Cleveland Museum, which had already picked several choice morsels at the dispersal of the Guelph Treasure, sent emissaries to Sir Joseph. They came back with the Delia Robbia plaque which shows the head of a tousled-haired young boy, mouth open as in adenoids. He is supposed to be singing.