Quoted by Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Rennaissance. 1873.
Description:

'Luca [della Robbia]'s new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mere rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a few hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success, to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with its strange, bright colours--colours of art, colours not to be attained in the natural stone--mingled with the tradition of the old Roman pottery of the neighbourhood. The little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up in that district from time to time, are still famous. These colours haunted Luca's fancy. 'He still continued seeking something more,' his biographer says of him; 'and instead of making his figures of baked earth simply white, he added the further invention of giving them colour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them. Cosa singolare, e multo utile per lo state!' -- a curious thing, and very useful for summer time, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye.' (40)

'In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity.' (56)

'Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished; but finished or unfinished, or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummate the sentiment of the whole company—ghosts through which you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall, on autumn afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all.' (68)

'Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and cheeks, lost for us.' (n. on p. 69)