Philobiblon

Since I’ve restarted doing handling in the British Museum Enlightenment Gallery, I’ve been brushing up on some of the pieces with which I’m less familiar, so reading Italian Maiolica by Timothy Wilson, 1989 (actually a catalogue of the Ashmolean’s rather fine collection).

I’m not greatly into later ceramics, but there’s something rather magical about these, particularly the earlier (late 13th, 14th and early 15th century), which manage to combine a medieval sensibility with a growing artistic sophistication. They actually get much less interesting, in my view, when they start to copy Italian woodcut prints of the period – after which they are merely derivative (although this is usually regarded as the high period of the art.)

The method of covering earthenware with a glaze made opaque with oxide and then painting on the glaze was introduced from the Islamic world about 1200. Originally only copper green and purple or brown from manganese were used for the images. Full details are (unusually) preserved in a manuscript treatise written about 1557 by Cipriano Piccolpasso of Castel Durante, Three Books of the Potter’s Art.

Dishes were thrown on a wheel or pressed into moulds, then fired at about 1000C before being dipped in a glaze made chiefly of potash (from burning the lees from wine barrels), sand and the oxides of lead and tin. Later other pigments for the images were added: cobalt (blue), yellow (antimony), orange (antimony and iron), and white (tin). Sometimes a transparent glaze was painted over the top and the piece fired again at a higher temperature.

The only image on the Ashmolean site is not quite typical, although there is something medieval about it, “Maiolica plate painted with a head composed of penises”.

And reading around the subject, I find that the memory of some Italian women has, however imperfectly, been preserved in some of these dishes – the belle donne.

And I also learn of the clearly named Potweb scheme, by which the Ashmolean is putting its entire collection on line, unfortunately not yet the “spouted bowl”, Orvieto, late13th or 14th century, or the “Dish, a huntsman blowing his horn, deruta, c. 1500″… hint, hint, should anyone relevant be reading this….