MAIOLICA
A plate of Urbino ware of about 1540 in the British Museum
The earthenware made in Central Italy was usually called majolica, in our spelling maiolica. The derivation of its etymology, from the island of Majorca, seems no mere superficial inference from similarity of sounds. Its peculiarity was a glaze, which, besides giving a vehicle for colour, remedied the permeable quality of ancient pottery. Such a glazed surface had long been known to the Saracens, and was imported by the Moors into Spain and the Balearic Isles, in the shape of gaily-tinted tiles, arranged in bands or diaper on their buildings. To these succeeded azulejos, generally of blue in various shades, which were mosaicked into church walls in various historical compositions, from designs which Mr. Stirling ascribes to Murillo's pencil. The conquests or commerce of the Pisans imported this fashion, at first by incorporating concave coloured tiles among brickwork, afterwards, at Pesaro, by the use of encaustic flooring. Nor can we exclude from view that the earliest Italian ware has decorations either in geometrical patterns, or with shamrock-shaped foliations of a character rather Saracenic than indigenous, and more indicative of moresque extraction than were the apocryphal armorial bearings of Spain and Majorca, at a period when such insignia were often borrowed as mere ornaments, in ignorance of their origin and meaning. The fabric thus introduced spread over most of Central Italy, and between 1450 and 1700 was largely practised at the towns of Arezzo, Perugia, Spello, Nocera, Città di Castello, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Forlì, and Faenza (whence its French name fayence), Pesaro, Urbino, Fermignano, Castel Durante, and Gubbio, as well as at various places in the Abruzzi.
There is, however, another quarter to which vitrified or encaustic ware may be ascribed, in so far at least as regards improved methods and more important results. Luca della Robbia[*241] was born at Florence in 1399, and from being a jeweller, took to modelling statues and bas-reliefs in clay. Annoyed by the fragile nature of these, and perhaps by the doubtful success of terra cotta, he discovered a mode of glazing the surface of his beautiful works, with, it is said, a mixture of tin, terra ghetta (from the lake of Thrasimene), antimony, and other mineral substances. The secret of this varnish was transmitted in the inventor's family until about 1550: it ended in a female, with whose husband, Andrea Benedetto Buglione, it died. Recent attempts to revive the art at Florence have proved but partially successful, and wholly unremunerative; indeed, the mechanical difficulties exceed those of sculpture, including the separation of the work into sections before drying and burning it, and its eventual reunion into one piece. Although neither mild nor equal, the climate at Florence does not seem to influence the Robbian fabrics in the open air, but they have suffered from the frosts and snows of our duchy, where several are broken or blistered, such as the lunette of S. Domenico at Urbino. By much the finest specimen I know there remains [1843] in the desecrated oratory of the Sforzan palace [of 1484] at Gradara; it may be by Andrea della Robbia, and represents an enthroned Madonna and Child, nearly life-size, with attendant saints, the predella complete, and the whole a fine monument of Christian art. Originally, the plastic surface of Robbian ware was of a uniform glistening white, which, though cold in effect, is very favourable to the pure religious sentiment at which it generally aimed. The eyes were then blackened, in order to aid expression. Next, the pallid figures were relieved against a deep cerulean ground. The followers of Luca added fruits and flowers, wreathed in their proper colours. Agincourt justly regrets that these men were led into such innovations by a desire for mastering difficulties, and the ambition of adding to sculpture the beauties of painting; for when colour is given to draperies, the eye is ill-reconciled to an addition which seems to transfer such productions from the category of high art to the level of waxwork. By a further modification, the flesh parts were left unglazed, bringing the warm tone of terra cotta to harmonize with the coloured costumes, architecture and backgrounds being still usually white or deep blue. Passeri, however, asserts for this coloured glaze an earlier discovery in his own province, where pottery was certainly made in the fourteenth century. But it is generally admitted that the art of combining with it lively colours was greatly improved after Pesaro had passed under the Sforza. In 1462, Ventura di Maestro Simone dei Piccolomini of Siena established himself there, along with Matteo di Raniere, of a noble family at Cagli, in order to manufacture earthenware, and may have directed attention to the productions of della Robbia, who had already been employed at Rimini by its tyrant, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta.
An account of majolica[*242] ought to contain the various places noted for its manufacture, the peculiar qualities distinguishing their respective productions, the methods by which these qualities were given, and the artists most successful in producing them. But on most of these points we are left in great ignorance, which my limited observation has not enabled me to dispel. All I can offer is a list of the manufactories and artists, classed to the best of my power, and preceded by a few very general notices of the process.
The Chevalier Cipriano Picolpasso, of Castel Durante, doctor in medicine and majolica-painter under Duke Guidobaldo II., left a MS. professing to record the secrets of his art; but Passeri, after examination, pronounces his revelations trite, and his historical notices barren. It is, however, agreed that Pesaro was the first site within the duchy of Urbino where the fabric attained celebrity, and that its earliest efforts were called mezza or "half" majolica. This is distinguished by a coarse gritty fracture, of dirty grey colour, and a glaze which does not take much lustre or transparency. It is generally in the form of plates, many of them huge, all clumsily thick, and frequently of a dingy, ill-vitrified yellow on the back. The lustre on the front is rather pearly than metallic; but prismatic, or even golden, iridescence is met with. These productions are assigned, by Passeri and others, to the fifteenth century; but the arms of Leo X. appear on one in the mediæval exhibition of 1850 (No. 543, belonging to Mr. S. Isaacs), and on another in the Hotel Cluny, at Paris; while, in the museum of the Commendatore Kestner, Hanoverian minister at Rome, is a third, designed after Marc Antonio. The "fine" majolica attained its greatest perfection at Urbino between 1530 and 1560, and it was prized chiefly for the perfect vitrification and transparency of its varnish, the comparative thinness and whiteness of the texture, the brilliant colouring, and masterly design. Gubbian pottery combined in some degree the qualities of half and fine ware, but excelled all others in metallic and prismatic glaze.
MAIOLICA