This book is dedicated to maiolica, the tin-glazed earthenware of Renaissance Italy. Ceramic glaze whitened with tin-oxide made the perfect ground for painted decoration, and the period 1480-1550 saw an explosion of every kind of imagery as ceramic painters responded to the new technologies of printing and printmaking. Françoise Barbe concentrates on the 16th century as a “golden age” and on istoriato: narrative-painted ware which only ever represented a tiny proportion of the maiolica produced in pottery workshops all over Italy but which receives disproportionate attention from collectors and scholars. This is not perhaps surprising. Made for the urban elites of Renaissance Italy, the new art form of istoriato provides a fascinating index of artistic expression and documents a wide repertory of subject matter. Maiolica in all its forms was made and used both in the great artistic centres and beyond; within the ruling elites and lower down the social scale. It provides unique insight into literacy, dialect and language, regional identity, religious culture, the revival of classical subjects and a developing sense of history.
Majolique: l’Âge d’Or de la Faïence Italienne au XVIe Siècle presents a very French emphasis on literary themes and their graphic expression. Barbe shows maiolica painters responding to the prints of Schongauer and Dürer but also illustrates a more unusual pairing: Nicola da Urbino’s translation of Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s chiaroscuro print of around 1510, Lovers Surprised by Death. Nicola did not merely simplify and copy the print to fit his curved, circular surface of a ceramic plate—difficult enough in itself—by introducing an exergue as on an ancient Roman coin to fill the difficult space at the base and adding a wall on the right as a framing device. He has responded subtly to the way in which the feathered wings of Death meld into the hair of the young woman as she flees in fright; both are highlighted with minute touches of white pigment. The use of a pale blue tonality for the scene, enlivened with pale green in the architectural details, with dark blue drawing and white highlights, is restrained and sophisticated as a response to Burgkmair’s vision and is an original work of art in itself.
Barbe’s attractively illustrated survey draws on the latest scholarship, acting as a useful introduction for the general reader and as a handbook for students. She reviews early istoriato as it developed contemporaneously in a number of different pottery centres around 1480-1520. Chapters follow on the high point in the 1520s and on lustre as a luxury finish in Gubbio and Deruta. Subjects and models, ornamental designs and the function of maiolica is then discussed, ending with two chapters considering istoriato around 1540-50 and the new taste for white maiolica from the 1550s.
A discussion of historic maiolica collections in France might have been enlightening; Maiolica scholars joke that pieces with erotic and pornographic subjects often derive from French collections. A case in point is the unique dish now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. It presents a composite head formed entirely from penises of a man in profile. Inscribed on the back with the mark of the painter Francesco Urbini of Urbino and dated 1536, the dish anticipates Arcimboldo and comments ironically on the more usual profiles of beautiful women on maiolica. It is inscribed: “Every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks”. On the back is written: “If you want to understand the meaning, you will be able to read the text like the Jews do” (that is, like Hebrew: right to left).
As Timothy Wilson has pointed out, this kind of playful pornography is strongly associated with the writer Pietro Aretino, who had a series of sonnets addressed to him; in one, the Pope is accused of making cardinals from “I visi di cazzo” or “prick faces”. Proof that Grayson Perry is not the first artist in modern times to paint pornography with political themes on ceramic.
• Dora Thornton is the curator of Renaissance Europe at the British Museum and of the museum’s Waddesdon Bequest gallery of 300 objets d’art, supported by the Rothschild Foundation
Majolique: l’Âge d’Or de la Faïence Italienne au XVIe Siècle
Françoise Barbe
Citadelles & Mazenod, 272pp, €59 (hb)