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Excerpt from Robbia Heraldry In attempting to define the authorship and date of the very numerous products of the Delia Robbia school I have been embarrassed by the lack of documentary and historical evidence and consequently have usually been compelled to rely on the evidence of style alone. I count it most fortunate for these studies that my friend Air. Rufus G.Mather, residing in Florence, was prepared to devote his energies to the discovery of documents, which in many cases have proved to be invaluable. These he is publishing in Italian periodicals while I am utilizing them in these Princeton monographs. A much neglected series of Robbia monuments are the coats of arms, which are found on altarpieces and other monuments, or set up as memorials of office on the Communal Palaces of many Italian towns. These coats of arms not only throw light upon the activities, religious and political, of many aristocratic families of Tuscany, but with them are associated dated inscriptions, which assist us in fixing the period of undated monuments. Robbia Heraldry, as a special department of a broader Italian Heraldry, is specifically Tuscan, and limited to the productions of a school of artists who worked almost entirel in glazed terra-cotta. Some of the tinctures of Robbia coats of arms may be considered as conventional substitutes. Thus white is the colour used for argent, and yellow for or Gules was difficult to obtain in baked glazes and assumed various tints of violet or manganese. A dark violet served also for sable. But while the tinctures applied by superficial paint to coats of arms executed in stone or marble have faded away, those of the Delia Robbias remain unchanged and render bright and interesting the dull facades of the City Halls in Italian towns. This monograph was not written as a contribution to heraldry, but inasmuch as it represents coats of arms not recorded in such a corpus as Crollalanza's Dizionario sforico-blasonico delle famiglie Italiane and in many instances records variations therefrom, it should have some importance for the student of heraldry. It was intended as an aid to the history of Italian art. Hence I have interested myself more in the forms of the shields, in the types of the garlands, in the stylistic qualities of the inscriptions, than in the variations from type in the heraldic emblems or their tinctures. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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