Maiolica

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An albarello (drug jar) from Venice or Castel Durante, 16th century. Approx 30cm high. Decorated in cobalt blue, copper green, antimony yellow and yellow ochre. Burrell Collection
An albarello (drug jar) from Venice or Castel Durante, 16th century. Approx 30cm high. Decorated in cobalt blue, copper green, antimony yellow and yellow ochre. Burrell Collection

Maiolica designates Italian tin-glazed pottery dating from the Renaissance.

Since the fifteenth century Italian maiolica reached an astonishing perfection, using the same production and decorative techniques as the Andalusians and Egyptians. Italian artists later developed several new varieties including the Gubbio lustre, which used colours such as greenish yellow, strawberry pink and a ruby red. Maiolica pattern dominated the ceramic industry in Italy to the extent that it was used also for metallic lustre in the 1530s. Drury in his work "Maiolica" suggested that this ware reached Italy from Sicily and is "it occurs in the form of plates, covered bowls, and 'albarello' and is supposed to be the workmanship of Moorish potters in Caltagiron."[1] Caltagirone is a city in province of Catania, Sicily.

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[edit] The name maiolica

The name is thought to come from the medieval Italian word for Majorca, an island on the route for ships that brought Spanish lustred Hispano-Moresque wares, to Italy from Valencia in the 15th and 16th centuries, or from the Spanish term obra de Malaga that denotes “[imported] wares from Malaga”. Majorca and other Balearic islands were under Muslim rule until 1230. Italian ships, mainly Genoese and Venetians, often called there to collect tin glazed pottery as well as other goods, gradually leading to the foundation of the so called 'Majolica' or 'Maiolica' pottery style, after the island of Majorca. Moorish potters from that Island were also recruited and brought to Sicily to work on this style. Other academics, like art historian John Sweetman,[2] thought Maiolica originated from Malaga through the movement of its pottery and craftsmen.

During the Renaissance, the term maiolica referred solely to lusterware, including both Italian-made and Spanish imports, but eventually the term came to be used when describing ceramics made in Italy, lustered or not, of tin-glazed earthenware. With the Spanish conquest of Mexico, tin-glazed maiolica wares came to be produced in the Valley of Mexico as early as 1540, at first in imitation of tin-glazed pottery imported from Seville.[3]

[edit] Tin-glazed earthenware

Tin glaze gives artists a brilliant white, opaque surface to paint over, a medium that was also adopted by the Della Robbia family of Florentine sculptors. The colours are applied as metallic oxides to the unfired glaze, which absorbs pigment like fresco, making errors impossible to fix, but preserving the brilliant colors of the Renaissance in a way that paintings cannot. Maiolica thus requires a second firing, and in the case of lustred wares, yet a third, at a lower temperature. Kilns required wood, only to be found on hillsides, at ever higher altitudes, and a source of suitable clay. Materials for glazes usually had to be imported.

Blue and white vase with oak-leaf decor, Florence, 1430 (Louvre Museum)
Blue and white vase with oak-leaf decor, Florence, 1430 (Louvre Museum)

The fifteenth-century wares that initiated maiolica as an artform were the product of a long technical evolution, in which medieval lead-glazed wares were improved by the addition of tin oxides, under the initial influence of Islamic wares imported through Sicily.[4] Such archaic wares[5] are sometimes dubbed "proto-maiolica.[6] During the later fourteenth century the limited palette of colours was expanded from the traditional manganese purple and copper green to embrace cobalt blue, antimony yellow and iron-oxide orange. Sgraffito wares were also produced, in which the white tin-oxide slip was decoratively scratched to produce a design from the revealed body of the ware: sgraffito wasters excavated at kilns in Bacchereto and Montelupo as well as at Florence show that such wares were produced more widely than at Perugia and Città di Castello, their traditional attributions.[7]

[edit] History of production

Refined production of tin-glazed earthenwares made for more than local needs was concentrated in central Italy from the later thirteenth century, especially in the contada of Florence. The city itself declined in importance in the second half of the fifteenth century, perhaps because of local deforestation, while the production scattered among small communes[8] and, after mid-fifteenth century, at Faenza. Significantly, in a contract of 1490[9] twenty-three master-potters of Montelupo agreed to sell the year's production to Francesco Antinori of Florence; Montelupo provided the experienced potters who were set up in 1495 at the Villa Medicea di Cafaggiolo‎ by its Medici owners.[10] Florentine wares spurred characteristic productions in the fifteenth century at Arezzo and Siena.

Istoriato decor on a plate from Castel Durante, c 1550-1570 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille)
Istoriato decor on a plate from Castel Durante, c 1550-1570 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille)

In Romagna, Faenza, which gave its name to faience, produced fine maiolica from the early fifteenth century; it was the only fair-sized city in which the ceramic industry became a major economic component.[11] Bologna produced lead-glazed wares for export. Orvieto and Deruta both produced maioliche in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, maiolica production was established at Castel Durante (illustration, right), Urbino, Gubbio and Pesaro. Some maiolica was produced as far north as Padua, Venice and Turin and as far south as Palermo and Caltagirone in Sicily.[12] In the seventeenth century Savona began to be a prominent place of manufacture.

The variety of styles that arose in the sixteenth century all but defies characterization.[13] Italian cities encouraged the start of a new pottery industry by offering tax relief, citizenship, monopoly rights and protection from outside imports.

An important mid-sixteenth century document for the techniques of maiolica painting is the treatise of Cipriano Piccolpasso, not a professional potter himself.[14] Individual sixteenth-century masters like Nicola da Urbino, Francesco Xanto Avelli, Guido Durantino and Orazio Fontana of Urbino, Maestro Giorgio of Gubbio and Maestro Domenigo of Venice all deserve individual treatment.

A modern Faenza plate, adapting a traditional Chinese design
A modern Faenza plate, adapting a traditional Chinese design

The tradition of maiolica died away in the eighteenth century, under competition from inexpensive porcelains and white earthenware.

Some of the principal centers of production (e.g. Deruta and Montelupo) still produce maiolica, which is sold in quantity in Italian tourist areas. Modern maiolica looks different from old maiolica because its glaze is usually opacified with the cheaper zircon rather than tin, though there are potteries that specialise in making authentic-looking Renaissance-style pieces with genuine tin-glaze.

"By a convenient extension and limitation the name may be applied to all tin-glazed ware, of whatever nationality, made in the Italian tradition ... the name faïence (or the synonymous English 'delftware') being reserved for the later wares of the 17th Century onwards, either in original styles (as in the case of the French) or, more frequently, in the Dutch-Chinese (Delft) tradition."[15] The term "maiolica" is sometimes applied to modern tin-glazed ware made by studio potters (as in Osterman's book, see below).

The English word, majolica, is also used for Victorian majolica, a different type of pottery with clear, coloured glazes.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Drury C. E. Fortnum (1892) ‘Maiolica’, Chapman & Hall, London, quoted by E.A. Barber, (1915), Hispano Moresque Pottery', The Hispanic Society of America, New York, pp25-.26.
  2. ^ Sweetman John (1987), ‘The oriental obsession:Islamic inspiration in British and American art and architecture 1500-1920’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  3. ^ Florence C. Lister and Robert H. Lister, Sixteenth Century Maiolica Pottery in the Valley of Mexico (Tucson: Anthrological Papers of the University of Arizona) 1982.
  4. ^ Richard A. Goldthwaite, "The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica" Renaissance Quarterly 42.1 (Spring 1989 pp. 1-32) p. 1.
  5. ^ Hugo Blake, "The archaic maiolica of North-Central Italy: Montalcino, Assisi and Tolentino" Faenza 66 (1980) pp 91-106.
  6. ^ David Whitehouse, "Proto-maiolica" Faenza 66 (1980), pp 77-83.
  7. ^ Galeazzo Cora, Storia della Maiolica di Firenze e del Contado. Secoli XIV e XV (Florence:Sassoni) 1973
  8. ^ Galeazzo Cora (1973) noted kilns dispersed at Bacchereto (a center of production from the fourteenth century), Puntormo, Prato and Pistoia, none of them site-names that have circulated among connoisseurs and collectors.
  9. ^ Reproduced in Cora 1973.
  10. ^ In the 1498 inventory there is noted in the villa's piazza murata (the walled enclosure), fornaze col portico da cuocere vaselle ("kilns for baking pottery"), let to Piero and Stefano foraxari, the "kilnmasters" of the maiolica manufactory for which Cafaggiolo is famed. These are Piero and Stefano di Filippo da Montelupo, who started up the kilns under Medici patronage in 1495, earlier than has been thought (Cora 1973 gave a date 1498; John Shearman, "The Collections of the Younger Branch of the Medici" The Burlington Magazine 117 No. 862 (January 1975), pp. 12, 14-27 gives 1495, based on a document.
  11. ^ Goldthwaite 1989:14.
  12. ^ Rackham, p. 9; Caiger-Smith p.82
  13. ^ Goldthwaite 1989:p. 6 notes that Paride Berardi's morphology of Pesaro maioliche comprises four styles in 20 sub-groups; Tiziano Mannoni categorized Ligurian wares in four types, eight sub-categories and 36 further divisions; Galeazzo Cora's morphology of Montelupo's production is in 19 groups and 51 categories. The diversity of styles can best be seen in a comparative study of albarello produced between the 15th and 18th centuries.
  14. ^ The standard English translation is The Three Books of the Potter's Art, translated and introduced by Ronald Lightbown and Alan Caiger-Smith, (London) 1980.
  15. ^ Honey, p.387

[edit] Bibliography

  • Cohen, David Harris and Hess, Catherine, A Guide To Looking At Italian Ceramics (J. Paul Getty Museum in association with British Museum Press, 1993)
  • Cora, Galeazzo Storia della Maiolica di Firenze e del Contado. Secoli XIV e XV (Florence:Sassoni) 1973. The standard monograph on the main early centers, published in an extravagant format that now brings over $1200 on the book market.
  • Faenza. Journal published since 1914 devoted to maiolica and glazed earthenwares.
  • Honey, W.B., European Ceramic Art (Faber and Faber, 1952)
  • Liverani, G. La maiolica Italiana sino alla comparsa della Porcellana Europea A summary of a century's study, largewly based on surviving examples.
  • Mussachio, Jacqueline, Marvels of Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics from the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Bunker Hill Publishing, 2004)
  • Osterman, Matthias, The New Maiolica: Contemporary Approaces to Colour and Technique (A&C Black/University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) ISBN 0-7136-4878-3
  • Rackham, Bernard. Italian Maiolica (London: Faber and Faber Monographs)
  • Wilson, Timothy, "Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance (London) 1987. Bibliography.
  • ---, Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics in the Ashmolean Museum (Ashmolean Handbooks, 1989) ISBN 0-907-84990-3

[edit] External links