MARCH 21 – NOVEMBER 15, 2025
Performance and Display brings together a remarkable selection of maiolica pottery from the Italian Renaissance that demonstrates the beauty and versatility of an art form which is often overlooked in the study of Renaissance art.
The Italian Renaissance was a period of incredible technological and artistic growth and maiolica required numerous skills in both areas to be successfully produced. It is because of this, among other reasons which are discussed throughout the exhibit, that the art historian Caroline Campbell in her essay The Place of Maiolica among the Arts of the Renaissance, went so far as to suggest that maiolica may be the quintessential Renaissance art form. Though that might seem like an ambitious claim, it is the idea that this exhibit explores.
Strictly speaking, maiolica is any earthenware pottery coated in a lead glaze made white by the addition of tin, applied after a first firing. The brilliant white surface was perfect for the addition of color, achieved with the application of pigments made from metallic oxides. This technique was discovered in the ninth century in the area which is now modern-day Iraq and was used by Islamic potters to imitate Chinese porcelain. The technique spread through the Islamic world, and then from Spain was imported into Italy. It is in Italy that the craft arguably reached its greatest heights. The color palette available for early maiolica was limited to brown, green, and blue. One of the greatest technological leaps for maiolica seen in the Renaissance is the discovery of new colors. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the palette flourished, with the addition of red, yellow, orange, fig. 7
purple, black, and white pigments. The strengths of each pigment could be varied by diluting the mixture and, by using new illusionistic painting techniques being developed by Renaissance artists, the palette could be pushed to its limits. Once the design was finished, the vessels would be fired a second time. In the second firing, the colors fused permanently into the glaze. This means that while paintings in other media have faded over time, the maiolica that we see today is just as vibrant as when it emerged from the kiln over 500 years ago.
In addition to having vivid colors, some maiolica was further embellished with the application of luster, which required a third firing. Luster would add a glittery sheen over the surface, which was meant to imitate the luminosity of gold and silver wares, and would increase the value of the piece. Lusterware was a more valuable form of maiolica not only because of its appearance, but because of the great risk involved. In a firing of one hundred luster pieces, only five or six would be sellable. This was a highly specialized technique which was practiced in only two places in Italy, Deruta and Gubbio, the latter being the origin of the Cupid plate in the exhibition.
Among maiolica workshops, competition was rife, as knowledge of specialized technologies like lusterware could mean gaining a significant edge over other workshops. Consequently, potters were very secretive about their processes. Some would go so far as to keep their secrets until literally on their deathbeds, only then passing them along. It is largely thanks to the efforts of one man, Cipriano Piccolpasso, that we know so much
about the production of maiolica. Piccolpasso was born in Castel Durante, an important maiolica production center near Urbino, though he was not a potter himself. While working as a public servant, he was commissioned by Cardinal François de Tournon to write and illustrate a manuscript on the process of making maiolica, perhaps intended to act as a guide for setting up maiolica production in France, though that never came to be. Piccolpasso’s manuscript is made up of three books, providing incredible detail on how to make maiolica. The manuscript was never published but was rediscovered in the eighteenth century and is now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A facsimile of the manuscript is provided for visitors to the exhibition and the original is available to be viewed online.
Just as maiolica was a technological achievement, so too was it an artistic one. Having a collection of intricate and historiated vessels communicated great taste and sophistication and as such, vessels were collected fervently. Historiated pieces often depicted biblical or mythological scenes, the same subjects depicted by the great painters or sculptors of the day. For example, The Conversion of Saul is a subject seen in both a maiolica bowl in this exhibition and in a monumental fresco Michelangelo painted for the Pauline Chapel at the Vatican. It would be very convenient to be able to draw or paint anything from memory, but that is not the case for most artists and was certainly not the case for most Renaissance artists. It was common practice for painters to work from shared model books and in some cases it’s evident fig. 5
that different artists used the same reference. This was standard practice for maiolica artists as well. Piccolpasso details many examples of design guides in his manuscript. Maiolica painters also worked from contemporary prints, which was the subject of a 2018 exhibition entitled Sharing Images: Renaissance Prints into Maiolica and Bronze at the National Gallery, Washington. The plate depicting Orpheus charming the beasts is an example of a maiolica painter’s engagement with classical mythology and contemporary prints. The story comes from the ancient Roman poet Ovid and the pose of Orpheus on this plate comes from an early sixteenth century print by Marcantonio Raimondi entitled Seated Man Holding a Flute.
many of these objects have, that they were for display only but the consensus has shifted to the belief that many of these were used as tableware. The incredible condition in which many of them come to us today can be explained by silverware not being commonplace at the Renaissance table, so there was nothing to scratch the surfaces.
Maiolica did not have to have intricate figurative scenes to be prized however. The salt cellar is painted on two of its sides with a crowned eagle, a symbol found in the family crests of many wealthy and powerful families. As it is a common symbol, it is not known exactly who commissioned this piece, but the possibilities certainly are exciting. The three primary suspects are the Estes or the Gonzagas, both eminent art patrons, or the Montefeltro family who ruled Urbino and Gubbio, both important maiolica production centers. Regardless of the exact commissioner, the eagle placed so prominently on a piece of tableware indicates this to be a piece of immense pride.
As shocking as it may seem, viewing them in museums today, it is thought that these vessels were collected not just for their beauty, but also their function. It was once thought, based on how little wear
Alchemy, the (supposed) process of turning basic natural elements into extraordinary ones, was a popular scientific subject in Renaissance Italy. Unfortunately for its practitioners, not much came from this study. Perhaps the closest thing to alchemy that was ever achieved in the Renaissance was in the manufacture of maiolica ceramics. With humble lumps of mud, various unassuming powders, buckets of grey liquid, and the transformative power of the kiln, skilled artisans created fine polychrome ceramics decorated with anything from simple botanical or geometric motifs to great mythological or biblical scenes, the same as would have been put down in oils by the great painters or carved from marble by the great sculptors of the day. Maiolica was appreciated, appreciated greatly, by even the most ardent artistic patrons, whose names now litter textbooks of Renaissance art. Maiolica artists did not become famous like their counterparts in painting and sculpture yet they shared with them many of the same practices and demonstrated both technological and artistic prowess in their craft. In its engagement with the work of the greatest artists of the day and its role in everyday life for both modest and erudite purposes, there are few things that embody the Renaissance more than maiolica.
