Dish with young woman

On this large round dish is painted in lustre on a blue ground to the waist and in profile, a young woman elegantly dressed in a bloused dress with a square neckline and long sleeves. She wears jewellery and her blond hair is held in place by a cloth headdress. Opposite her, a phylactery contains a maxim. An ear-of-wheat motif fills the cavetto of the dish, encircling the portrait as in a rondo. The rim, wide and flat, is decorated with a wreath of lustre mixed flowers surrounded with cobalt; every bud gives rise to a new stem.

This dish is a piece of maiolica, a type of earthenware produced in Italy during the Renaissance. Earthenware designates ceramics in argilo-siliceous paste, covered with an opaque white tin glaze. The process was invented by Muslim potters and developed in Iraq in the ninth century, perhaps with the intention of imitating Chinese porcelain. This technique has the advantage of producing a surface suitable for the use of painted decoration, and its adoption in the West had a significant impact on the development of European ceramics. Initially, earthenware was imported from the countries of the Muslim West, mainly Egypt, then Andalusia. The wares of Málaga were particularly well-known, and it is now thought that the word “maiolica” was derived from the name of this city. The first maiolica pieces produced in Italy date to the thirteenth century: this was archaic maiolica, produced in northern Italy, and proto-maiolica has been found in Sicily and Lucera, as well as in the Peloponnese and Palestine.

While the term maiolica is applied to all Renaissance Italian earthenware, whatever its decoration, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the word was used only for earthenware with lustre decoration (other types of earthenware were called bianchi, “white ceramics”, at the time). Unlike Spain, Italy was late to master the lustre technique. Only three workshops, relatively modest, produced lustreware beginning in the sixteenth century; production declined rapidly the following century. This relative failure is surprising given the craze the technique had given rise to around the Mediterranean basin for centuries. The changes in the aesthetics and tastes of European art during the Renaissance partially explain this phenomenon. At that time, artists were interested in the rendering of volumes and space, which the lustre technique did not allow.

The town of Deruta in the Tiber valley was certainly the first to produce lustreware, around 1500. Rodrigo Borgia, elected pope in 1492, belonged to a noble Valencian family that patronised the ceramics production of the town. This dish, with its very finely drawn motif, which was then painted, and its limited colours – the golden yellow of the lustre, the cobalt blue and the white of the glaze – is characteristic of the products of this town in the first half of the sixteenth century. The motifs are also characteristic of the bella donna series: inscribed scrolls and plant motifs in keeping with the light and the sun. These dishes were most probably engagement or wedding gifts that were placed on a dresser in the homes of the rich during the Renaissance.