Putti, detail. of the Cantoria

Executed between 1431 and 1439, dismantled in 1688, and reconstructed from its surviving elements in 1882, Luca's Cantoria offers us every element needed to understand his original position in the climate of the Renaissance. Its “antique rhythmical simplicity”, as Roberto Longhi has written, belongs to the living line of stylistic development of a classicism which, from Andrea Pisano and Maitani to Raphael and Fra Bartolomeo, stands clearly apart from the new realism and rationality of Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio. Compared with a Ghiberti, a Jacopo della Quercia or a Nanni di Banco, who instilled the serene compositional harmony and concrete plastic decisiveness of classical examples into the rhythmic pattern and descriptive analysis of Gothic taste, Luca arrives at a form that synthesizes naturalistic appearance and melodic symmetry. He embodies the canon of metaphysical beauty in the gentle equilibrium of images of reality: and this is his classical Renaissance naturalism.