While as regards material the object of emulation was Chinese porcelain, the forms affected by the Medici porcelain show little indication of extraneous influence. By their variety and by the gracefulness of many they bear witness to the taste and inventiveness of the ducal patron, who interested himself personally in the processes of fabrication and was doubtless in artistic matters the guiding spirit of the works. The decoration, painted in cobalt-blue usually of rather dull tone, either alone or outlined with pale manganese-violet, is of two distinct styles. One of these is made up of grotesques of the kind familiar in the later maiolica of the Urbino school. The other style is marked by Oriental motives, derived in some cases from Chinese, but more often from Near Eastern sources. The designs are never mere copies, but rather interpretations of their prototypes; often indeed they betray only slight traces of the inspiration to which they are due.
The last-named class of design is well exemplified by the bottle in [Plate 10], one of the four pieces of Medici porcelain belonging to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The subtle shapeliness of the modelling and the ably-distributed painted ornament, in which a slight suggestion of the contemporary Chinese “blue and white” of Wan Li is perceptible, betoken the work of an artist whose conceptions were superior to the material at his disposal for their embodiment.
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From the scanty documents that remain, it would appear that the venture of Francesco de’ Medici was abandoned for a time, and that his successor Ferdinand I. summoned to Florence one Niccolò Sisti for the purpose of re-establishing there the manufacture of porcelain. The kilns were later removed to Pisa, and a document exists to prove that in 1620 Sisti received monetary aid for his work from the then-reigning Grand Duke, Cosmo II. In the light of these records, meagre as they are, the greatest interest attaches to the little bowl figuring in [Plate 11], one of the most precious documentary pieces of porcelain in the South Kensington collections; it was formerly in the possession of Mr. Henry Griffith and later belonged to Mr. Henry Willett of Brighton, on whose death it was acquired for the Museum. This bowl is of remarkably thin material, light to handle, and shows a somewhat yellow tone in the paste by transmitted light. The design painted round the outside consists of four alternate sprays of hyacinth and lily, separated by flowers resembling scabious or cornflower branching from a curved serrated leaf; these motives are obviously borrowed from the Turkish earthenware of the period. In a medallion inside the bowl is a view of a city with a domed building; on the bottom are the initials “G. G. P. F.” and the date 1638.
The only other piece hitherto identified as belonging to the same kind is another bowl, in the collection of Mr. Montague Yeats Brown. Like its companion, it is light in weight and thin in the walls. It is decorated round the sides externally and internally with a frieze of birds perched upon rocks; inside is a medallion with a group of ruins among trees, curiously anticipating the fanciful compositions seen on Worcester and Bow china of the eighteenth century. In the painting there appear in addition to cobalt-blue two colours of common occurrence in the maiolica of the Urbino school, a strong brownish-orange and a greenish-blue derived from copper, the latter much blurred in the firing. This bowl also bears a signature and date, “I. G. P. F. 1627”, and it is of extreme interest to observe that both bowls are marked with the same devices, a cross potent and a curious aggregation of strokes, of which the significance is difficult to determine; evidently these signs are the distinctive mark of the factory. The meaning of the initials is also uncertain, but in view of the known existence of the Sisti factory at Pisa a few years before the date on the earlier bowl, it may be conjectured that the last letters “P. F.”, occurring in both signatures alike, stand for “Pisanus fecit” or “Pisano fece”; if that be so, the preceding “G” may indicate the family name of the potters who took over from Sisti the secret of porcelain making, while the “I” and the first “G” respectively refer to the baptismal names of different members of the family. Be this as it may, these two bowls, unique in the nature of their paste and decoration and by reason of the dates they bear, are of the utmost interest as isolated landmarks in the history of European porcelain, standing midway between the production of Francesco de’ Medici and the earliest French achievements.
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The Tuscan experiments above recorded were made at an unpropitious time, and were consequently destined to have no lasting effect in the development of European ceramics. Italy was then fast relapsing into the state of torpor which followed as a reaction from her restless activities in the age of the renaissance, and the time had not yet arrived when the influx of Chinese porcelain, resulting from the extension of trade relations with the East, was to spur on the potters and chemists of Europe, aided by royal patronage, to success in their efforts to produce a similar kind of ware. Porcelain is not heard of again in Italy till about 1720, when Francesco Vezzi, a Venetian goldsmith, in co-operation with a deserter from the Saxon royal factory, succeeded for a short time in producing hard porcelain of a type similar to that of Meissen. At a later date another Saxon workman named Hewelcke set up a short-lived factory in Venice, but no porcelain of importance was produced there till the establishment of the works of Geminiano Cozzi in 1765.