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Ceramics Bring the Italian Renaissance to Life: British Museum Displays Dazzling Wares
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12438 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,072 Words |
| Author
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Beryl Platts
Beryl Platts writes on social and family history. She has
published two books on early heraldry and has been editor of
Country Life's famous "Collectors' Questions" for the last
twenty years. |
The great painted dishes of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy are among the few authentic objects surviving from the Renaissance. The form and color of ceramics are as fresh today as the day five hundred or more years ago when the pieces were first fired. We see these dazzling wares looking just as they did when their potters took them from the kiln. Antique tableware has always had its own fascination; whatever we may or may not know about our forebears, we do know that they had to eat, like us, every day.
Serious research into the ceramics of the Italian Renaissance did not begin until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before then the pieces were often labeled as Raphael Ware, under the illusion that the great artist himself had decorated them. The loan exhibition mounted at the British Museum this summer, from May 7 to September 20, benefits not only from the many superb specimens in its own collection but also from the so-called document pieces - those items that show by potters' signatures, factory marks, inscribed dates, or coats-of-arms the transitional stages that led up to and though this extraordinary flowering of the art of ceramics.
A Renewal of Learning
In its own day, the Renaissance was described as a renewal of learning, a return to a pattern of thought rather than to a state of innocence. But neither return nor rebirth can really encompass all the activities of this period. The philosophical and artistic impulses that dominated these vital years were aided, and indeed made possible, by a series of wonderfully inventive technical advances, among which we must place the development of ceramics. At such an artistically active period, one skill inevitably was linked to another. The clearest account we have about the production of tin glaze, so essential to the development of ceramics at this time, is Cipriano Piccolpasso's The Three Books of the Potter's Art (1557). The work was itself extracted from a general work on chemical and metallurgical technology available in Venice in 1540 (Vannoccio Biringuccio's Pirotechnia).
It cannot be wholly coincidental that the cities worst affected by the Black Death of 1348 - Florence, Orvieto, Siena - were at the very heart of the regions that would be producing pharmaceutical pottery within the next century. The precious medicaments had to be kept in vessels with an impermeable glaze. Although glazes of various types had been known from Roman times, it was tin glaze that caught the imagination of the apothecaries, probably because of the pure white
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