Pater talks about ‘the feelings and actions of the special moment, all that (because in its own nature it endues but for a moment) is apt to look like a frozen thing if one arrests it. This made me feel like I understood the personalities of the characters in the sculpture. For example, the act of the Virgin showing the child nature and other life form.
I felt I deeply appreciated the construction of his work. As Pater puts it, sculpture has been constructed through subtle extract or essence of ideas and pure thoughts. It helped me to recognize the massive amount of detail in the sculpture that would’ve been sculpted to create the image he would of wanted to convey. The effect even gives the art a shadow to emphasize and express the realism.
Pater’s comment about the system of low relief overcoming the special limitation of sculpture and how this gives the art an individuality of expression pushed to caricature made me feel that the way this piece of art was constructed was to ‘vainly compete with the reality of nature itself’. In other words, it made me think that the point Luca della Robia was trying to get across to the admirer is the realism of religion.
