Albarello with epigraphic decoration

This Florentine albarello (apothecary’s vase) retains the classical form of its distant Eastern models. Cylindrical in profile, slightly incurved to make it easier to grasp, its rim allowed a parchment cover to be attached to it. The “blue and white” decoration is made up of wide vertical stripes, filled with two tangent circles containing a highly stylised large bryony leaf. Each stripe is separated from the next by a white ribbon containing a wavy line. The neck is adorned with a series of fine stems laden with needles, perhaps derived from bryony and which are sometimes called “Gothic leaves”. Whatever the case, the verticality of the decoration maintains this albarello in the tradition of Syrian products, while other Florentine examples of the same period[1] adopt decorations with multiple registers.

The first Italian ceramics intended to rival foreign ceramics commercially and artistically were those mass-produced for pharmacies and hospitals, which ordered large numbers of opaque and leakproof containers with isothermal properties. These were albarelli, large vases with ovoid bellies, sometimes equipped with two handles. Until the first quarter of the fifteen century, when there was a large order, the Italians, it seems, turned to Málaga (hence the name “maiolica” used for these pieces), Valencia and neighbouring Manises, or even to the Muslim Near East[2]. Damascus, in particular, was very popular for its “blue and white” pieces, as evidenced by the famous albarello decorated with the Florentine lily[3].

The bryony motif, very large here, is directly borrowed from Valencian potters who introduced it into their wares in the mid-fifteenth century, alongside other motifs, including chestnut, parsley, fern, ivy and “chains of spurs”. This repertory, which deliberately moved away from Muslim repertory as transmitted by the workshops Málaga, inaugurated a new phase in Hispano-Moorish ceramics, which gradually became “Gothic”. It was this last manifestation that Florentine ceramics inherited. Bryony, because of its delicacy, comprised an ideal background for large motifs: the coats of arms of patrician families, for example. However, its presence on a pharmacy pot was perhaps not due to mere whim: in addition to its diuretic properties, this plant was used for its soothing properties – for coughs or inflammations of the lungs. During antiquity, it was associated with Dionysos and his cult.

The “blue and white” of the Italian workshops was known as zaffera, a word that designates the pigmentation given by Asian cobalt. As it tended to bleed during firing, the Florentines surrounded it with a line of purplish manganese, rather similar to the black line used by the Syrians for the same purpose. In the thirteenth century, the ports of northern and southern Italy began to use it. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, glazed ceramics were developed under the protection of princes (the Medici, Manfredi and Della Rovere families). Florence, Faenza and Montelupo competed with their ceramics, supplanting Spain in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

[2] In 1420, a Milanese merchant ordered from a Manises potter 720 “Damascene” jars in gold lustre, probably to supply a hospital. In 1424 the inventory of a Florentine pharmacy mentions a large spice jar from Damascus or Málaga. But, from 1426, the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence asked a city potter for 588 pieces of “Damascene” crockery! A few pieces with the emblem of the hospital on their handles have survived. In 1430, Santa Maria Nuova ordered a thousand pieces from the Florentine potter Giunta di Tugio, who signed his works.

[3] Musée du Louvre, Paris (loan from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, inv. 4288).