Everything about Maiolica totally explained
Maiolica designates Italian
tin-glazed pottery dating from the
Renaissance.
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, thought Maiolica originated from Malaga through the movement of its pottery and craftsmen.
Since the fifteenth century the Majolica 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 America 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."
Caltagirone is a city in province of Catania, Sicily.
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.
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.
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. Such archaic wares are sometimes dubbed "proto-maiolica. 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.
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 and, after mid-fifteenth century, at
Faenza. Significantly, in a contract of 1490 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. Florentine wares spurred characteristic productions in the fifteenth century at
Arezzo and
Siena.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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 (for example
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." 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Maiolica'.
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