These men, though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of their teacher.
Coarser colours were introduced; the eye was dazzled with variety; but the power of speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.[99] After the Della Robbias, this is the place to mention Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio,[100] a sculptor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness of detail and aiming at more passion than Luca's taste permitted.

For the oratory of S.
Bernardino at Perugia he designed the facade partly in stone and partly in baked clay--crowded with figures, flying, singing, playing upon instruments of music, with waving draperies and windy hair and the ecstasy of movement in their delicately modelled limbs.

If nothing else remained of Agostino's workmanship, this facade alone would place him in the first rank of contemporary artists.

He owed something, perhaps, to his material; for terra-cotta has the charm of improvisation.

The hand, obedient to the brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy.