Fig. 71.—From the Kensington Collection.
With regard to some of the most celebrated maiolica, I have quoted the judgments of two most competent writers as to the beauties of two of the most famous artists. It is far from being high praise. I venture to say, in addition, that much, very much, of what I have had the opportunity to see, strikes me forcibly as being crude and poor in color, bad in drawing, uninteresting in design, and wretched in clay and in glaze. Not that there are not good and beautiful works among the maiolicas; but it seems to me they are few.
Besides this, I believe the great maiolica-painters, such as Xanto and Giorgio, were wholly wrong in attempting to transfer to pottery the pictures of Raffaelle and Giulio Romano; at least, they can be but very poor representations of the pictures themselves, and therefore unjust to their models, and useless to us as examples of high art.
We copy here ([Fig. 71]), from Mr. Fortnum, one of the elaborate figure-pieces of maiolica in the Kensington collection; which, as it seems to us, is a striking proof of what has just been said.
In the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston are to be seen ten or twelve plates, bowls, etc., which give a fair exhibition of the work of the sixteenth-century painters. Some of these are attributed to the best masters, the Fontana and Xanto, and one has the mark of Xanto.
The large and varied collection of Italian maiolicas brought to the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876 is now (May, 1877) to be seen in the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, and it offers an excellent opportunity for examining and studying these styles of fictile work.
What is doing in Italy now.—A very large show of Italian maiolica of to-day was made at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. What did we find there? Hundreds of imitations. Italy especially has been devoting herself with great industry to reproductions of the vases, ewers, tazzas, plaques, dishes, and so on, of the past; and some very fair ones were sent from Pesaro, Rome, and Faenza. The vases and ewers bearing figure-pieces or mythological pictures had a certain quality peculiar to this style of work which at first may excite distaste rather than desire, but after a time may induce a mild sort of assent; more, we believe, from the low and quiet tones and harmonies of color than from any marked excellence of either the form of the vase or the painted subject. The two names most conspicuous as potters in Italy now—Ginori at Florence, and Giustiniani at Naples—did not appear among the exhibitors, so far as we know. Of Ginori’s work we give a fine example in Fig. 71a. But if draughtsmen and artists so good would only give us their pictures of the life of Italy to-day as they so well could do—of the peasants and their donkeys, their vine-dressing and wine-making, their fishing, their cooking, their street-work in its thousand varieties! That they could, and do not; that they continue on and on with the stupid round of copy after copy in all departments of art, may mean that the good public who have money to spend want these copies, and therefore potters and painters sink from the clear air of invention and originality into the dull inanities of copying.