Majolica

MAJOLICA. - It is a variety of ceramics (v.), consisting of a body based on clay, firing in color, from red to flesh-pink. Its products, called after a first firing by the generic term "biscuit," are covered with a vitreous coating, made opaque by tin oxide (or by other opacifiers), generally white, called "glaze." On it, with colors based on metallic oxides that withstand the second firing (ca. 920°), and therefore called "grand feu" (high-fire), the decoration is traced with a brush or otherwise; the object is then covered with a "varnish," more commonly silico-lead, and fired a second time.

In this second firing the glaze, melting, fixes the colors and makes the object impermeable to liquids; the varnish, through its transparency, imparts greater brilliance to the surface: for this reason it is called "vetrina" or "cristallina."

"Mezza m." (half majolica) was erroneously the name given to products of clay body, coated while still raw with a veil of white earth ("terra di Siena," "terra di Vicenza" or "ingobbiatura"), decorated by brush or sgraffito, covered with "cristallina" and fired only once. The fundamental colors, as has been said, based on metallic oxides ground in water, are green from copper, violet from manganese, yellow from antimony, blue from cobalt, etc. Such "grand feu" colors differ from those called "petit feu" (small fire), because the latter, being more fusible, are applied by means of resin onto the glaze already fired at 920° and fixed on it with a third firing (that is, "third fire" or "muffle fire") at about 650°.

A complementary decorative effect (with "metallic lustres") can be obtained by applying, onto the already decorated and fired glaze, metallic salts (most commonly of copper, silver and bismuth) dissolved in diluted acetic acid or else mixed in vinegar with calcined kaolin, then firing a third time at ± 700° in a reducing atmosphere.

The "metallic reflection" ornament (gilding) is obtained by painting the parts to be gilded on the already fired glaze with "liquid gold" (gold chloride mixed in a resinous substance) and firing at ± 700° in a normal atmosphere. Similarly for silvering.

The word m. is the Tuscan softening (cf. Inferno, XXVIII, 82) of the name of Majorca, an island of the Balearics, one of the ports of the coasting trade that from the workshops of the Iberian Levant, with the close of the fourteenth century and even more in the following century, imported into Italy the much-admired ceramics gleaming with golden lustres and shimmering iridescences, often bearing the blazon of the great Italian families. Only after the middle of the sixteenth century did that name come to designate the entire production with tin glaze, independently of the third-fire ornament.

The opinion is still widespread that Italian majolica makers learned their art from masters who immigrated here from the East. However, medieval "encyclopedias" attest that well before the year 1000 the use of tin glaze (already well known to the decorators of the ancient East) had also become a common notion in Italy.

This technique was then masterfully set forth around the middle of the sixteenth century by the knight Cipriano Piccolpasso (1524-79) of Castelducente, today Urbania, in his treatise Li tre libri dell'arte del vasaio (manuscript in the library of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London) together with the most precise teachings concerning all the practices of the majolica art.

Certainly, the advance toward the higher forms of the technique came about by degrees. In the early Middle Ages and still down to around the year 1000 the common production shows that phase primordial ("paleo-Italian") phase, consisting especially of jugs and pots with expanded and flattened body, the body adorned with relief bosses or deep sgraffito: crude works, of grayish paste (as, for example, certain pieces that came out of the so-called Fount of Juturna in the Roman Forum or found in other places even beyond the Alps) assignable to Carolingian times, nonetheless coated with a vitreous covering, albeit in muted tones of dark green and yellowish, which made the vessel more suited to meeting the needs of use, compared with the unglazed pottery or pottery covered only with earthy coatings, previously employed.

The renewed taste for color will then show the application, on the body of the ware, of a coating of white earth ("slip"), on which the ornament could be sgraffitoed or even painted, but which must be protected by a vitreous covering that renders its surface impermeable to liquids.

Examples of this are also found in those "basins" or bowls that Romanesque architects set into buildings, especially religious ones, with which Italian cities were being embellished to enliven the sober tones of the brickwork: basins or bowls of Italian type, which accompanied the polychrome and iridescent ones that renewed Mediterranean trade imported from Egypt, Syria, and Moorish Spain. The fusion into a single technical process of the method of concealing the natural color of the biscuit and of rendering it impermeable with a single coating through the application of enamel constituted an achievement, from which, from the 12th century onward, the entire development of this art would descend. For in this way the enameled covering, that is, maiolica, became the ground on which, through the work of excellent masters, those prestigious paintings were laid out that imposed themselves on universal admiration, so as to be considered a particular aspect of Italian civilization of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Still anonymous is the legion of these first craftsmen, of whose work only scanty relics are known; a Petrus orzarolus worked in 1142 in Faenza; a Martinus orciolarius in 1195 in Florence; a Petrus vascellarius in 1211 in Orvieto. And of this "archaic phase" of production, better studied in the pieces that emerged in Orvieto and Faenza, there remain more than anything else jugs with ever whiter enamel, with the first painted ornaments in violet and green, with geometric, floral, heraldic, and animal motifs, also derived from prototypes of the East and of Byzantium, by way of the Iberian Levant.

Rarer and more timid is the human figure, which only in the subsequent phase (called the "severe style" for the gravity of its decorative forms and for the overall sobriety of its chromatic rendering) will tend increasingly to become the focal center of the entire decoration. With the second and third decades of the fifteenth century, while the number of vase forms is seen to grow richer (for example, with jugs, spherical vases on a high foot, handled pouring vessels shaped like little barrels, albarelli for pharmacy drugs, etc.), there will be found, alongside the purple-black given by manganese, the black and brown from iron, the brilliant green due to copper, the turquoise of the Levantine "zaffera" introduced by Venetian merchants, until such color, lightened into a beautiful cobalt blue, would become a monopoly of the German mines.

The ample and increasingly "human" output of the workshops operating in the "severe style" can be subdivided according to the dominant motifs in their ornamentation, or the exotic schemes that were soon assimilated by the Italian workshops. Splendid are the products of the first two families: the "green" and the "relief zaffera" (of which the Florentine and Faentine ones are the best studied), which cover the first half of the century. The "Italo-Moorish" families — soon exhausted —, the "Persian palmette," the "peacock feather," and the "damascene" ones reach and somewhat pass beyond the end of the fifteenth century, a time when one witnesses the full introduction of Renaissance motifs.

In the 16th century, the abandonment of the archaizing tradition and adherence to an increasingly graceful, sonorous, and transparent coloristic taste turn decisively the work of certain workshops toward distinguished artistic value. The movement begins in Faenza. A new sense of color, which is based on a delicate turquoise tonality, carried also to highly skillful glazes and accompanied by tones of rare preciousness, acquires dominant value over a marvelously candid and velvety enamel. The central scene of the plate or jug becomes a true and proper representation, proportioned to the border that encloses it, and acquires an intense expressiveness. Even where, in the inspiration of the subject, and it often happens that one must note modules from other forms of art — woodcuts, for example, engravings, paintings by an author — the use of bold foreshortenings and ingenuous movements, the austere, symmetrical, and wholly ordered arrangements impart to the work a high decorative sense: it now appears as the product of a personal contribution of the craftsman, expressed by his own source of thoughtful and concentrated graphic and chromatic plasticism, with the value and energy of an invention. The same landscape for the first time becomes an active coefficient in the intense emotionality of the whole, while the surrounding repertoire, drawn from the ancient "grotesques," then newly discovered and made known, rendered with a nimble hand and an exquisite play of polychromies, adds grace to the work no longer obscure, no longer confusable with the usual utilitarian production, but coveted by the client and "marked" by its own author, who is aware of its worth. The masters of this "new style," from contact with lords, whose heraldic requirements they also satisfy, with humanists and scholars, whose advice they follow, form a school of painting, whose "individual masters" excel, from 1490 to 1525.

It is the acme of the "Faentine canon," whose precious and refined notes then polarize around the products of the "Casa Pirota," of decided "bello style." But already with the third decade of the 16th century, this "first phase of the istoriato" is followed by another, which treats the ornament of the maiolica as a true and proper painting, spreading over the entire surface of the plate, often deforming itself for whoever looks at it, given the very shape of the vessel on which it is traced. The personality of the craftsman, stimulated to virtuosities of execution, becomes the slave of a more lavish sense of color, over which the note of tawny tints now dominates. Thus a school comes to impose itself that finds its leaders in the Duchy of Urbino. And while at Deruta, in Umbria, maiolica is also decorated with lustres of a greenish gold and violet, at Gubbio, then belonging to the Duchy of Urbino, master Giorgio Andreoli applies his opulent golden "reflections," of "ruby" and changing hues, on the maiolica that the other workshops send him in competition: a shining meteor, whose fame still endures. Later, in 1569, the duke of Urbino granted to the Lanfranco of Gabicce, working in Pesaro, a privilege "for having found the way to put true gold in earthenware vessels and adorn them with gold work."

In the Rovere state, first at Casteldurante (called Urbania from 1635 in homage to Pope Barberini), then at Urbino, which is its distinguished capital, Nicolò Pellipario (d. before 1547) produces excellent, meditated paintings on lordly table services and on large display plates, which will set a school. Cultured, versatile, most skillful, rich in taste and inventiveness, with a palette delicate and expressive at once, he is the head of the new school, which will find its best followers in Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo and in the relatives of Nicolò himself, who in the new seat will assume the surname Fontana.

This manner of "historiating" the tableware with rich, polychrome paintings based on warm colors, but with ample use of half-tones, spreads to the major Italian workshops, which often treat it with particular local accents. Ample "credenze," rich supplies of pharmacy vases, such as that of the duke of Urbino, later donated to the Treasury of the Holy House of Loreto, trays, pourers, inkwells and other shaped objects, become the expression of this taste. Urbino makes a gift of them to the court of Spain; the king of France would want to obtain them from Faenza by magic ("per incanto"). Mythology, sacred history, costume are put to use, and the subjects, formally derived also from engravings, especially of the school of Raphael, are most often illustrated by the captions painted on the reverse of the pieces. The affixing of the "mark" of the craftsman or of the workshop becomes common practice.

The "second," the "third istoriato" with their ornaments richly polychrome "a raffaellesche" and "a cammei," from the Metaurense workshops and their followers, will become an article of export also abroad. And as already in the early years of the 16th century the "Faentine-style" Francisco Nicoloso had excellently painted maiolica in Seville, it will now be the masters in the Urbino manner (of Urbino itself, of Pesaro, of Casteldurante, of Faenza, of Venice, of other places) who spread and teach this art in France, in the Netherlands, in certain zones of Germany, in England and then also in the Moravian and Bohemian lands, giving rise there to the particular class of "habane" maiolica.

Venice, from its eclectic workshops, spreads large and small vases with dense, showy foliage with human busts of strong coloristic effect; Apulia and Sicily, already invaded by Faentine and "Metaurense" imports, rework their schemes with a somewhat tired palette on modest glaze. With the end of the 16th century and the beginnings of the next, the word "faenza" enters the language of France, and from this the word folence will be adopted with slight variants by the other European idioms and will become there - and still remains there today - the meaningful homage of the entire continent to an exquisite form of Italian art.

In Italy, moreover, in the second half of the sixteenth century, out of satiety with an overly widespread product, because of its diminished formal merits, and because of a new orientation of taste, a lively reaction arose against this style, which has been called "fiorito" (flowery). At its head were once again the Faenza workshops, which had always been very numerous and copiously productive. Virgiliotto Calamelli and "Don Pino" (Leonardo Bettisi) can be cited as the forerunners of the new taste for "bianchi" (whites), to which, naturally, the broader interest now turning ever more toward Chinese porcelain is not extraneous. From the opulent polychromies of the palette of the "metaurensi" maiolica painters, one thus passes to a range of simpler harmonizations, and very often on the velvety and fat glaze, as never before, airy, lively thread-like designs are traced, in blue alone or accompanied by sparing notes of green and yellow: a coat of arms, an image of a putto or a saint, a brief impressionistic composition makes up the entire figuration. To this style, executed with a free and rapid hand, Ballardini has already given the name "compendiario," to underscore its incisive expressiveness. It too conquered the Italian workshops, until from other places in Italy - Liguria, Tuscany, for a brief stretch, Abruzzo - the signs of another different decorative manner set out in the course of the seventeenth century. The Ligurian one - at Savona, Albisola, Genoa - unfolds on decidedly Chinese schemes, at first solely adopting on the white or slightly light-blue glaze a dark blue color, applied also in skillful veils, to paint summary, tasteful fantasies of birds and putti in flight, of galleys under sail, of landscapes with dense foliage and rocks and clumps of sharp-edged grasses.

It should be noted that this repertoire is common at this time also to the Dutch and German, English and Portuguese workshops. A little later, polychromies of animals and trees will recall the manner that developed in that period at Talavera in Spain.

Montelupo fiorentino, in the first half of the seventeenth century, alongside its large and small jars with broad green foliage, and mottoes and whimsies, presents a series of plates that one would gladly call "picaresque." Painted with bravura, in a certain buffoonish manner of theirs, but not devoid of the "grandiose" inherent to the period, with caricatures rendered in coarse, popular polychromy, bravos and musketeers, people on horseback or standing with comic swagger, in duel or in battle, with pikes and muskets and flags and drums, offer the extremes of a grotesque Spanishness. And accompanying them are images of peasants with curious postures, sketched incorrectly but with likeable bravura. Castelli of Teramo, on the other hand, returns to the "istoriato," often spread across the entire surface of the piece, but enclosed in frames with Baroque designs featuring ample vegetal volutes, architectural motifs, putti, etc. The palette is "languid": muted greens, reddish yellows, veiled blues: sometimes touches of gold. But the landscape is treated with exemplary sensitivity. There are also large paintings with complex figured scenes, sacred and mythological, and interiors, rendered with rare mastery. The extremely industrious families of the Grue and the Gentile share the honor of this production, which innovates in the painting on maiolica of southern Italy.

With the eighteenth century, the maiolica of northern Italy becomes decidedly a follower of foreign models, Dutch in particular and French. Thus the designs after Bérain disseminated by the Provençal workshops of Moustiers, thus the styles of the three "Louis" of France, and the imitation - also with "petit feu" colors - carried out with rare skill and effectiveness on the already fired glaze, of the Oriental porcelain widely diffused throughout Europe, and especially of the German porcelain under the impulse received from Strasbourg. Alongside the chinoiseries, which by then dominated the entire ornamental world, there are the whimsies of the rocaille, the "Indian flower" and "German flower" decorations, the "Japanese-style" ornament after the Imari models, where, to red and green, gold is added, often replaced by yellow.

A "new compendiario" can be seen in the "macchiette" and "ruins" of the last period of the century. But besides porcelain, an always relatively precious material, maiolica found itself having to contend with the new ceramics, which spread rapidly and, for commercial as well as practical reasons, came to surpass every other product: English "earthenware," perfected by Wedgwood. It quickly conquered all the markets of the world, and maiolica, defeated in the harsh economic battle as an artistic manufacture for wide distribution, would remain reduced to uses of a popular type (rustic maiolica) or would become a refined product to be executed in imitation of ancient masterpieces or in affirmation of the genius of individual craftsmen in the best potters' workshops. - See plates CXXIII-CXXIV.

Gaetano Ballardini