Little is known of the potter's art in Italy after the fall of the Roman
empire till the 13th century. The traditions of the Roman potters appear
to have been gradually lost, leaving behind only sufficient skill to
make rude crocks for domestic use and to coat them, if required, with a
crude yellowish lead glaze sometimes stained to a vivid green with
copper oxide. Applied ornament of roughly modelled clay and scratched
designs were the chief embellishments of such wares, which were of the
same class as the medieval pottery of Great Britain and the north of
Europe. In the 12th and 13th centuries, however, contact with Asia
Minor, Syria, Egypt and Spain, where ceramic skill had been highly
developed in fresh directions, as we have seen, introduced into Italy as
well as the rest of Europe those superior wares characterized by a white
surface decorated with bright colours under a brilliant transparent
glaze, and glorified by metallic lustres. The Italian potters did not
long remain unaffected by these influences, but though Persian, Syrian
and Egyptian pottery must have been fairly plentiful in the households
of the wealthy, it was the distinctively Hispano-Moresque wares from
which the potters of Italy drew the inspiration for a new ware of their
own. The technique of a siliceous slip-coating with colour painted on
that and covered with a transparent alkaline glaze, was only sparingly
used, and then not very successfully; it is only the introduction of the
tin-enamel that was turned to fruitful account and led to the production
of the magnificent Italian majolica of the 15th and 16th centuries. In
the same way the practice of lustre decoration might have been learnt
from the Orient, but its late appearance on Italian wares (16th century)
and its evident relationship to the lustres of Spain, rather than to the
earlier lustres of Egypt, Syria and Persia, are further evidence that
though oriental decorative motives gave the Italians certain early types
of design, it is the Hispano-Moresque potters from whom the Italians
learnt the art they were afterwards to develop so splendidly in a new
direction.[15]
All the Italian pottery above the level of common crocks may be
conveniently grouped into four classes.
[Illustration: FIG. 44.--Italian Graffiato Plate, 16th century. (South
Kensington Museum.)]
1. The native wares, made of coarse and often dark-red clay, coated with
a white clay slip (a kind of pipe-clay) and covered with a crude lead
glaze, either yellow or green. The idea of rendering this ware
ornamental, and fitting it for more than vulgar use, led to a great
development of the _graffiato_ process; where, while the vessel, with
its white clay coating was firm yet soft enough, patterns were scratched
or engraved through the white slip to the red body beneath. This
decorative method has been already mentioned several times, for it was
practised during the early middle ages in all the countries from India
to Italy, and the Byzantine potters were adepts in its use. Nor has its
practice ever ceased in Italy, for through all the times when painted
majolica was the ware of the wealthy, this earlier and humbler pottery
was used by those who could not afford the former; and the
gaily-coloured later wares of this kind have a fine decorative quality
of their own. From the depth beneath the present soil at which fragments
of this ware have been disinterred, it is obvious that the method was
widely practised in early times, and no simpler glazed wares are known
except those covered all over with green, yellow or brown glazes. Early
examples have been found all over northern Italy--in Faenza, Florence,
Pisa, &c., and particularly in Padua, where it seems to have been
extensively made. Pavia was another centre of its manufacture, even to
the end of the 17th century, and Citta di Castello must have been noted
for it in the 16th century, for Piccolpasso describes this ware as "alla
Castellana" (see fig. 44). Apparently in the latter half of the 15th
century a sudden advance takes place in the colouring of this
_graffiato_ ware. Instead of the simple glazes, of uniform colour, of
the earlier productions, underglaze colours--green, purple, blue and a
brown of the tint of burnt sienna which passes into a glossy black where
it is thick--were applied in bold splashes under the straw-coloured
glaze, producing a rich and decorative effect by very simple means. As
fine examples of this kind we may mention the dish with the mandoline
players, and one with cupids disporting themselves in a tree, in the
Victoria and Albert Museum; the tazza, supported by three modelled
lions, in the Louvre; and the dish, with figures of the Virgin and two
saints, in the museum at Padua. The ware has often been called, quite
erroneously, _mezza-majolica_. It had nothing to do with majolica, being
the natural development of a much older process; and its manufacture was
carried on all through the period of majolica manufacture and has never
ceased.
2. _Mezza-Majolica_--This name is accurately applied to certain Italian
wares that made their appearance in the 12th century or even earlier,
when rude patterns--a clumsy star, a rude crossing of strokes or some
equally elementary work--are found painted on a thin white ground
covering a drab body. The pieces, generally pitchers of ungainly forms,
are uncouth in the extreme; the body has been shaped in local clay and
then thinly coated by dipping it into a white slip, which seems at first
to have been of white clay only, though oxide of tin and lead were added
to it even in the 12th century. The colours used for the rude painting
were oxide of copper and oxide of manganese, and the final glaze, which
is generally thin and often imperfectly fused, seems to have been based
on the alkaline glazes of the nearer East. The specimens so assiduously
recovered by Professor Aragnani, some of which, or similar wares, are to
be found in the Louvre, the British and the Victoria and Albert museums,
are typical of the rude work out of which, by a fuller knowledge of
Spanish methods, the painted majolica grew.
3. _Majolica_--For the last three centuries the word majolica has been
used to signify an Italian ware with a fine but comparatively soft buff
body, coated with an opaque tin-enamel of varying degrees of whiteness
and purity, on which a painted decoration was laid and fired. In the
later pictorial wares, a fine coating of transparent alkaline glaze was
fired over the painting to soften the colours--really to varnish them.
The word itself appears to have been derived from the name of the island
Majorca, and was originally applied by the Italians to the lustred wares
of Spain which were largely imported into Italy, probably arriving in
ships that called at or hailed from Majorca, as we do not believe that
the ware was actually made in that island. That the secret of the
tin-glaze, which is the essential feature of Italian majolica, was known
in Italy in the 13th century is practically proved; and there is both
literary and archaeological proof of its use there in the 14th. Mention
of it is made in the _Margarita Preciosa_ published at Pola by Pierre Le
Bon in 1336, and the well-known jug, bearing the arms of Astorgio I.,
discovered under the Manfredi palace at Faenza, must have been made
shortly after 1393. Its development marched side by side with that of
the mezza-majolica, until it practically superseded the latter for
painted wares in the 15th century; but the earliest examples have little
more than an archaeological interest, and it was only after the last
decade of the _quattrocento_ or the first of the _cinquecento_ that it
blossomed into an artistic creation. In its prime the production of
majolica was confined to a very small part of Italy. Bologna on the
north, Perugia to the south, Siena on the west, and the Adriatic to the
east, roughly enclose the district in which lie Faenza, Forli, Rimini,
Pesaro, Cafaggiolo, Urbino, Castel Durante, Gubbio, Perugia and Siena.
Towards the middle of the 16th century Venice on the one hand, and in
the 17th and 18th centuries the Ligurian factories at Genoa, Albissola
and Savona, made majolica of the later decadent styles, while, at the
end of the 17th and in the early part of the 18th centuries, the
southern town of Castelli, near Naples, produced a ware which closes the
period of artistic majolica.
[Illustration: PLATE I