road race, in bicycle racing, a contest run on a course marked out over open roads and highways. It may be several laps of a closed circuit, a point-to-point or town-to-town race, or a combination of several point-to-point stages lasting several days, with the winner being decided on the basis of

Silurian Period: Platform margins: …of strata belonging to the Road River Group in the Canadian Yukon. Based on sections in the Mackenzie Mountains, a distance of only one to a few kilometres separated the edge of a shallow-water carbonate platform from the deepwater shales of the basin. Submarine avalanches (turbidity flows) brought the 1,200…

Rockwell Kent: …tonal contrasts, as seen in The Road Roller. In the course of a varied career he worked as an architectural draftsman, as a lobsterman and carpenter on the coast of Maine, and as a ship’s carpenter. He explored the waters about Tierra del Fuego in a small boat and lived…

Road Runner, American cartoon character, a speedy, slender, blue and purple bird who continually frustrated the efforts of a coyote (Wile E. Coyote) to catch him. In a series of animated short films, the fleet-footed Road Runner races along the highways of the American Southwest, his legs and feet

Stephen Sondheim: …works include Bounce (2003; retitled Road Show in 2008), about the colourful adventures of a pair of early 20th-century American entrepreneurs.

road: Traffic control: Signs advise the driver of special regulations and provide information about hazards and navigation. They are classified as regulatory signs, which provide notice of traffic laws and regulations (e.g., signs for speed limits and for stop, yield or give-way, and no entry); warning signs, which…

Aleksey Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy: …in 1946 under the title The Road to Calvary (1946). For the trilogy and for his long unfinished historical novel Pyotr I (1929–45; Peter the First, 1956), he received Stalin prizes. During World War II he was a prolific author of patriotic articles and also composed his two-part play Ivan…

Eric Clapton: King and The Road to Escondido (2006) with roots guitarist J.J. Cale. The critical and commercial success of these albums solidified his stature as one of the world’s greatest rock musicians, and subsequent releases, such as Clapton (2010), Old Sock (2013), and I Still Do (2016), finely…

Alfred Hutchinson: His autobiography, Road to Ghana (1960), was highly acclaimed and translated into several languages. It tells of his escape from Johannesburg (via East Africa and Ghana) to the United Kingdom after he had been imprisoned in 1952 and charged with high treason in 1956 for opposing apartheid.

Howard Hawks: Films of the mid-1930s of Howard Hawks: Hawks’s next project, The Road to Glory (1936), was unrelated to his earlier film of the same name. A World War I drama based on another screenplay by Faulkner, it told the story of a father (Lionel Barrymore) and son (Warner Baxter) who end up fighting in the…

Penelope Lively: Her first adult novel, The Road to Lichfield (1977), in which past truths shift when viewed from a contemporary perspective, reflects her interest in history and in the kinds of evidence on which contemporary views of the past are based. Her other novels for adults included Treasures of Time…

Anton Makarenko: The Road to Life; or, Epic of Education), recounts his educational work at Gorky Colony. Kniga dlya roditeley (1937; A Book for Parents) and Flagi na bashnyakh (1939; “Flags on the Battlements”; Eng. trans. Learning to Live) explore the theory of collective education. Makarenko regarded…

Road to Morocco, American screwball comedy film, released in 1942, that was the third and most acclaimed of the “Road” movies featuring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. Jeff Peters (played by Crosby) and Orville (“Turkey”) Jackson (Hope) accidently blow up the ship they have stowed away

DC Comics: Vertigo and continuity reboots: …History of Violence (1997) and Road to Perdition (1998) by writer Max Allan Collins and artist Richard Piers Rayner. Both graphic novels were later adapted into award-winning motion pictures. Far more enduring was DC’s Vertigo imprint, which began in 1993 as a home for mature-themed horror titles such as Hellblazer,…

Sam Mendes: …to helming the gangster movie Road to Perdition. He then left the Donmar as artistic director. His production of Gypsy (2003), staged at the Shubert Theatre in New York and starring Bernadette Peters, was widely acclaimed. He released the film Jarhead, a Gulf War drama, in 2005. Mendes’s next film…

Norman Z. McLeod: Danny Kaye and Bob Hope: …Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour in Road to Rio (1947), a popular installment in the Road series. It was the first of several films that McLeod and Hope made together. They next collaborated on the comedy western The Paleface (1948), with Jane Russell. After the Fred Astaire–Betty Hutton musical Let’s Dance…

F.A. Hayek: Life and major works: …of Hayek’s most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, which became an immediate best-seller. In the same year Hayek was elected as a fellow of the British Academy.

Bob Hope: Movies: In 1940 Hope made Road to Singapore, the first of seven popular “Road” pictures in which he costarred with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. Characterized by lighthearted irreverence, absurd sight gags, and an abundance of in-jokes, the Road pictures embody the brazen style of comedy in vogue during the…

Natalia Ginzburg: …che va in città (1942; The Road to the City), is the story of a young peasant girl who, lured by the excitement of the city, is seduced by and marries a man she does not love. A second novella, È stato così (1947; “The Dry Heart,” in The Road…

Bob Hope: Movies: …Road to Morocco (1942) and Road to Utopia (1946) are usually cited as the best in the series, also contributed to Hope’s status as one of America’s top box-office draws during the years 1941–53. His other successful films from this period included My Favorite Blonde (1942), Let’s Face It (1943),…

George Orwell: From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II: …and unorthodox political treatise titled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines…

John Livingston Lowes: His masterpiece is The Road to Xanadu (1927), which traced the origins of the inspiration and wordings in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” in sources indicated by records of the poet’s reading in his notebooks. The book was popular among scholars…

Road Town, chief town and port of Tortola Island and tourist centre for the British Virgin Islands, situated on the western side of Road Bay about halfway along the southern coast. The name derives from the nautical term “the roads,” a place less sheltered than a harbour but in which ships may lie

traffic control: Road traffic control: At the broadest level, road traffic control includes the layout of streets to serve a variety of travel needs in a region. Highways or expressways carry through traffic at high speed; arterial streets carry traffic within and across urban areas; and local…

buggy, light, hooded (with a folding, or falling, top), two- or four-wheeled carriage of the 19th and early 20th centuries, usually pulled by one horse. In England, where the term seems to have originated late in the 18th century, the buggy held only one person and commonly had two wheels. By the

George Miller: More success followed with Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), which is set after World War III. The antihero Max falls in with a group of people at an oil refinery and defends them from a motorcycle gang. Miller then took a break from Mad Max to work…

road: Legal control: …and pedestrians, known as the rules of the road; these dictate which side of the road to use, maximum speeds, right-of-way, and turning requirements. Third are those regulations that apply to limited road sections, indicating speed limits, one-way operations, and turning controls.

Wole Soyinka: …in Dakar, 1966; published 1967), The Road (1965), From Zia, with Love (1992), and even the parody King Baabu (performed 2001; published 2002), reveal his disregard for African authoritarian leadership and his disillusionment with Nigerian society as a whole.

Nick Cave: …the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The Road (2009), Hell or High Water (2016), and Kings (2018). In addition, he penned the screenplays for The Proposition, which earned him a special prize from the 2006 Venice Film Festival, and Lawless (2012), a Prohibition-era drama about bootlegging. Cave’s

Harry Martinson: …Wind”), a collection of poetry; Vägen till Klockrike (1948; The Road), a novel that sympathetically examines the lives of tramps and other social outcasts; and Aniara (1956; Aniara, A Review of Man in Time and Space), an epic poem about space travel that was turned into a successful opera in…

Cormac McCarthy: In the postapocalyptic The Road (2006; film 2009), a father and son struggle to survive after a disaster (left unspecified) that has all but destroyed the United States. McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for the critically acclaimed novel. His next novel, The Passenger, was not released until 2022.…

Avraham Trahtman: …Israeli mathematician who solved the road-colouring problem (a variant of the traveling salesman problem).

Avraham Trahtman: …Israeli mathematician who solved the road-colouring problem (a variant of the traveling salesman problem).

bicycle: Basic types: Road-racing bicycles are designed for maximum speed and weigh about 20 pounds (9 kg). They have very light frames, narrow high-pressure tires, dropped handlebars, and derailleur gears with at least 16 speeds. Track-racing models have a single fixed gear.

railroad: Location and construction: …also helped to improve railroad roadbeds in other ways. Where the roadbed is unstable, for example, injecting concrete grout into the subgrade under pressure is a widely used technique. In planning roadbed improvements, as well as in new construction, railroads have drawn on modern soil-engineering techniques.

Jimmy Durante: …Yorkers and in the movie Roadhouse Nights (1929). He starred in several radio programs during the 1940s, including “The Jimmy Durante Show” and “The Camel Comedy Caravan.” His closing line—“Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!”—became as famous as his felt hat, cane, and his persistent malapropisms and mispronunciations; the…

Roadian Stage, first of the three stages of the Middle Permian (Guadalupian) Series, made up of all rocks deposited during the Roadian Age (272.3 million to 268.8 million years ago) of the Permian Period. In 2001 the International Commission on Stratigraphy established the Global Stratotype Section

Hugh Laurie: …British politician in the miniseries Roadkill (2020).

Paul Ryan: …first version of his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a controversial budget plan that included a major overhaul of the tax code, the partial privatization of Social Security, and the transformation of Medicare into a voucher program. It also called for Medicaid to be replaced by state-controlled systems funded by…

roadrunner, either of two species of terrestrial cuckoos, especially Geococcyx californianus, of the deserts of Mexico and the southwestern United States. It is about 56 cm (22 inches) long, with streaked olive-brown and white plumage, a short shaggy crest, bare blue and red skin behind the eyes,

supercomputer: Historical development: Known as Roadrunner, for New Mexico’s state bird, the machine was first tested at IBM’s facilities in New York, where it achieved the milestone, prior to being disassembled for shipment to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The test version employed 6,948 dual-core Opteron microchips…

Anthony Bourdain: Later that year the documentary Roadrunner, an exploration of his life and career, was released.

Javier Bardem: …man contemplating alternate lives in The Roads Not Taken. His credits the following year included Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, and Being the Ricardos, Aaron Sorkin’s biopic about a turbulent week in the life of Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, both of

O. Henry: … (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908), Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909), Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs (1910). Whirligigs contains perhaps Porter’s funniest story, “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

Francesca Alexander: …manuscript that she had entitled Roadside Songs of Tuscany and had illustrated with drawings done in a fine and highly personal style. He also bought a second manuscript and published it in 1883 as The Story of Ida, attributing it to “Francesca.” The volume enjoyed several British and American editions.…

roan antelope, (Hippotragus equinus), one of the largest and most formidable African antelopes (family Bovidae) and a member of the tribe Hippotragini, the so-called horse antelopes. The roan is a powerfully built animal with long, sturdy limbs and a thick neck that looks thicker because of an

Appalachian Mountains: Plant and animal life: Roan Mountain in the North Carolina–Tennessee Unakas is one of the most extensive of these, with some 1,200 acres of natural gardens sprawling vivid rose and pink and purple rhododendron across its high pinnacle and down its slopes. It is estimated that, of some 2,000…

Roanne, town, Loire département, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes région, east-central France, on the Loire River. The town is located 40 miles (64 km) west-northwest of Lyon. Founded in the Romano-Gallic age, it was originally called Rodumna. The 11th-century castle-donjon is the only surviving remnant of its

Roanoke, city, administratively independent of, but located in, Roanoke county, southwestern Virginia, U.S. It lies on the Roanoke River, at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains, 148 miles (238 km) west of Richmond. Settled in 1740, it developed

Manchester University, private coeducational institution of higher learning in North Manchester, Indiana, U.S. It is a university of liberal arts and sciences that grants baccalaureate degrees in more than 40 areas of study, as well as several associate of arts degrees and master’s degrees. The

Roanoke College, private, coeducational institution of higher learning in Salem, Virginia, U.S. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and is also a member of Oak Ridge Associated Universities. Roanoke College offers bachelor’s degree programs in such areas as business

Roanoke Island, island in Dare county, off the coast of North Carolina, U.S. It lies south of Albemarle Sound, between the Outer Banks and the mainland. The island, 12 miles (19 km) long and an average of 3 miles (5 km) wide, was the site of the first attempted English settlement in North America

Lost Colony, early English settlement on Roanoke Island (now in North Carolina, U.S.) that mysteriously disappeared between the time of its founding (1587) and the return of the expedition’s leader (1590). In hopes of securing permanent trading posts for England, Walter Raleigh had initiated

Roanoke River, river rising in the Appalachian Valley in Montgomery County, southwestern Virginia, U.S., and flowing in a southeasterly direction for 380 mi (612 km) into Albemarle Sound, on the Atlantic coast of North Carolina. It drains an area of 9,580 sq mi (24,810 sq km). Just north of the

John Cage: …music of Erik Satie; and Roaratorio (1979), an electronic composition utilizing thousands of words found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake.

feline: The so-called “big cats” (genus Panthera), especially the lion, often roar, growl, or shriek. Usually, however, cats are silent. Many cats use “clawing trees,” upon which they leave the marks of their claws as they stand and drag their front feet downward with the claws extended. Whether such behaviour is…

roaring forties, areas between latitudes 40° and 50° south in the Southern Hemisphere, where the prevailing winds blow persistently from the west. The roaring forties have strong, often gale-force, winds throughout the year. They were named by the sailors who first entered these

Thomas Middleton: The Roaring Girl (1604–10?, with Dekker; published 1611) depicts events in the life of the notorious criminal Moll Frith (Moll Cutpurse), who dressed as a man and preferred her freedom to marriage. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613?, published 1630) is an exuberant comedy that…

Thomas Middleton: The Roaring Girl (1604–10?, with Dekker; published 1611) depicts events in the life of the notorious criminal Moll Frith (Moll Cutpurse), who dressed as a man and preferred her freedom to marriage. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613?, published 1630) is an exuberant comedy that…

Roaring Twenties, colloquial term for the 1920s, especially within the United States and other Western countries where the decade was characterized by economic prosperity, rapid social and cultural change, and a mood of exuberant optimism. The liveliness of the period stands in marked contrast to

The Roaring Twenties, American crime drama film, released in 1939, that was one of the most popular of the many gangster films produced by Warner Brothers. It featured the final screen pairing of actors James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. The Roaring Twenties follows three army buddies—Eddie Bartlett

Helen Wills was an outstanding American tennis player who was the top female competitor in the world for eight years (1927–33 and 1935). Wills began playing tennis when she was 13 and won her first major title, the U.S. girls’ championship, in 1921. She repeated as national girls’ champion in 1922

Howard Roark, fictional character, the architect hero of The Fountainhead (1943), the first best-selling novel by Ayn

Dean Martin: …a series of celebrity “roasts.” He continued to host celebrity roasts occasionally through 1984. Although Martin often seemed to be intoxicated during his television and nightclub performances—an impression aided by his easygoing manner, ever-present glass, and slurred singing style—he and his friends insisted it was part of his act.

poultry processing: Classification of birds: …are 14 weeks old as roasters.

history of Europe: Control over resources: …mining techniques and needed initial roasting before smelting. At the same time, they were more widely available than surface deposits, and there were sources in both central and western Europe—ores in Germany, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics were exploited from the early 3rd millennium bce. This long initial…

history of Europe: Control over resources: …mining techniques and needed initial roasting before smelting. At the same time, they were more widely available than surface deposits, and there were sources in both central and western Europe—ores in Germany, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics were exploited from the early 3rd millennium bce. This long initial…

roasting, cooking, primarily of meats but also of corn ears, potatoes, or other vegetables thus prepared, by exposure to dry radiant heat either over an open fire, within a reflecting-surface oven, or in some cases within surrounding hot embers, sand, or stones. The procedure is comparable to the

Cambodia, country on the Indochinese mainland of Southeast Asia. Cambodia is largely a land of plains and great rivers and lies amid important overland and river trade routes linking China to India and Southeast Asia. The influences of many Asian cultures, alongside those of France and the United

Roatán, town, northern Honduras, on the southwestern coast of Roatán, largest of the Bay Islands; it is known locally as Coxen’s Hole. Remains of 17th-century pirates’ fortifications can still be seen; it was from Roatán that the filibuster William Walker set sail on his third and last voyage from

John Hurt: …in an Irish village, and Rob Roy (1995), about the Scottish outlaw. On television he appeared as the title character in the children’s series The Storyteller (1987–88).

Rob Roy was a noted Highland outlaw whose reputation as a Scottish Robin Hood was exaggerated in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy (1818) and in some passages in the poems of William Wordsworth. He frequently signed himself Rob Roy (“Red Rob”), in reference to his dark red hair. Rob’s father, Donald

robāʿī, in Persian literature, genre of poetry consisting of a quatrain with the rhyme scheme aaba. Together with the mas̄navī (rhymed couplet), it is a purely Persian poetic genre and not a borrowing from the Arabic, as were the formal ode (qaṣīdah) and the love lyric (ghazal). It was adopted and

Georgian literature: The 20th century: …were the dramatist and novelist Grigol Robakidze and the poet Galaktion Tabidze. Robakidze developed the themes of Vazha-Pshavela’s “The Snake-Eater” in The Snake Skin, a tale of a poet’s search for his real identity. Robakidze also led a group known as the Tsisperqnatslebi (“Blue Horns”); its best poet was Titsian…

snook, any of about eight species of marine fishes constituting the genus Centropomus and the family Centropomidae (order Perciformes). Snooks are long, silvery, pikelike fishes with two dorsal fins, a long head, and a rather large mouth with a projecting lower jaw. Tropical fishes, they are found

Jason Robards was an American stage and film actor who was known for his intense, introspective performances and who was widely regarded as the foremost interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O’Neill. Because of the bitterness and disillusionment expressed by his father, onetime stage and

Jason Robards was an American stage and film actor who was known for his intense, introspective performances and who was widely regarded as the foremost interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O’Neill. Because of the bitterness and disillusionment expressed by his father, onetime stage and

robāʿī, in Persian literature, genre of poetry consisting of a quatrain with the rhyme scheme aaba. Together with the mas̄navī (rhymed couplet), it is a purely Persian poetic genre and not a borrowing from the Arabic, as were the formal ode (qaṣīdah) and the love lyric (ghazal). It was adopted and

Islamic arts: Robāʿiyyāt: Omar Khayyam: The work done in mathematics by early Arabic scholars and by al-Bīrūnī was continued by Omar Khayyam (died 1131), to whom the Seljuq empire in fact owes the reform of its calendar. But Omar has become famous in the West through the…

Steve Kerr: Later activities and coaching: …the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children were among those killed. During an NBA press conference, he yelled, “When are we going to do something?” Kerr went on to note that legislation involving background checks had stalled in the U.S. Senate. Alluding to…

Alain Robbe-Grillet was a representative writer and leading theoretician of the nouveau roman (“new novel”), the French “anti-novel” that emerged in the 1950s. He was also a screenwriter and film director. Robbe-Grillet was trained as a statistician and agronomist. He claimed to write novels for

Robben Island, island in Table Bay, Western Cape province, South Africa. It is 5 miles (8 km) west of the mainland and 6 miles (10 km) north of Cape Town and has an approximate area of 5 square miles (13 square km). Its name is the Dutch word for “seals,” once plentiful in the surrounding waters.

Robben Island, island in Table Bay, Western Cape province, South Africa. It is 5 miles (8 km) west of the mainland and 6 miles (10 km) north of Cape Town and has an approximate area of 5 square miles (13 square km). Its name is the Dutch word for “seals,” once plentiful in the surrounding waters.

Leonhard Frank: …first book, Die Räuberbande (1914; The Robber Band). The story of rebellious young boys who seek to create the ideal society but end up as “good citizens,” it embodies the main theme of his writings—the humorous exposure and realistic portrayal of the narrowness of the middle classes. While in Switzerland…

robber baron, pejorative term for one of the powerful 19th-century American industrialists and financiers who made fortunes by monopolizing huge industries through the formation of trusts, engaging in unethical business practices, exploiting workers, and paying little heed to their customers or

Margaret Atwood: Oracle (1976); Cat’s Eye (1988); The Robber Bride (1993; television film 2007); and Alias Grace (1996), a fictionalized account of a real-life Canadian girl who was convicted of two murders in a sensationalist 1843 trial; a TV miniseries based on the latter work aired in 2017, written by Atwood and…

Aleksandr Pushkin: Exile in the south: …the Caucasus), Bratya razboyniki (1821–22; The Robber Brothers), and Bakhchisaraysky fontan (1823; The Fountain of Bakhchisaray).

coconut crab, (Birgus latro), large nocturnal land crab of the southwest Pacific and Indian oceans. It is closely related to the hermit crab and king crab. All are decapod crustaceans (order Decapoda, class Crustacea). Adult coconut crabs are about 1 metre (40 inches) from leg tip to leg tip and

robber fly, (family Asilidae), any of about 6,750 species of predatory insects, worldwide in distribution, in the fly order, Diptera. Robber flies range in length to almost 8 cm (3 inches), making them the largest of all flies. Most are dull in colour, and their stout, often hairy, bodies resemble

Leptodactylidae: …of the genus Eleutherodactylus, or robber frogs. The young of this genus hatch as small frogs, rather than as tadpoles. The greenhouse frog (E. planirostis), a small brown frog commonly found in gardens, is a Cuban frog introduced into the southern United States. Many species have a very restricted distribution,…

councils of Ephesus, three assemblies held in Asia Minor to resolve problems of the early Christian church. In 190 Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, convened a synod to establish the 14th of Nisan (the date of the Jewish Passover) as the official date of Easter. Pope Victor I, preferring a Sunday as

Ellensburg, city, seat (1883) of Kittitas county, central Washington, U.S., on the Yakima River, 28 miles (45 km) north of Yakima. The first white man settled there in 1867, and three years later the valley’s first trading post, called Robbers Roost, was opened. The community bore that name until

Belgian literature: After World War II: …works of Willy Roggeman and Daniel Robberechts). The latter gained posthumous recognition for his uncompromising break with the narrative tradition. Michiels embarked on a multivolume project that systematically explores different themes by manipulating corresponding modes of writing and symbolic figures. Nevertheless, the tradition proved to be fertile—e.g., in the satiric…

Wild Bunch: …of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah; Robbers’ Roost, a region of nearly impenetrable rugged canyons in east-central Utah; and the Wilson W.S. Ranch, near Alma, New Mexico. Each area had cabins and corrals, and rustled horses and cattle could be grazed at Hole in the Wall and Brown’s Hole.

The Robbers, drama in five acts by Friedrich Schiller, published in 1781 and produced in 1782 as Die Räuber. Set in 16th-century Germany, The Robbers concerns the rivalry between the brothers Karl and Franz, both of whom operate outside conventional morality. A protest against official corruption,

robbery, in criminal law, an aggravated form of theft that involves violence or the threat of violence against a victim in his presence. Many criminologists have long regarded statistics on robbery to be one of the most accurate gauges of the overall crime

Australian literature: The century after settlement: Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888) was immensely popular, and it too achieved classic status. Of particular interest is the Australian vernacular in which the narrator, Dick Marston, presents his confession of his part in gang activity. Boldrewood also articulates the sentimental, stoic resignation that colonial Australians…

Andrea della Robbia was a Florentine sculptor who assumed control of the family workshop after his uncle’s death in 1482. Like Luca, Andrea della Robbia was apparently trained as a marble sculptor. His best-known works are 10 roundels of foundlings in swaddling clothes on the facade of Filippo

Giovanni della Robbia was a Florentine sculptor, son of Andrea della Robbia and grandnephew of Luca della Robbia who, upon the death of his father in 1525, assumed control of the family workshop. Giovanni’s early works, of which the most remarkable are a lavabo in the sacristy of Santa Maria

Giovanni della Robbia: Giovanni’s younger brother, Girolamo (1488–1566), was trained in Andrea’s studio and collaborated with his father and brother until he moved to France (c. 1527–28), where he was employed on the terra-cotta decoration of the demolished Château de Madrid. After the death of Francis I (1547), Girolamo returned to…