C. Drury E. Fortnum

“ Although probably not among the earliest manufactories or boteghe of Italian enamelled and painted wares, Gubbio undoubtedly holds one of the most prominent positions in the history and development of the potter’s art in the 16th century. This small town, seated on the eastern slope of the Apennines, was then incorporated in the territory of the dukes of Urbino under whose influence and enlightened patronage the artist potters of the duchy received the greatest encouragement; and were thus enabled to produce the beautiful works of which so many examples have descended to us. ”

“ Doubt and uncertainty had long existed as to the spot where the large “bacili” and other pieces of a well-known and abundant ware, lustred with a golden pigment of peculiarly pearly effect in certain lights, had been produced, and the discovery of these signed examples, having a somewhat similar metallic enrichment, caused connoisseurs to grasp at the, perhaps hasty, conclusion, that to Diruta must be assigned those wares of earlier date and hitherto unknown locality, and that Diruta must have possessed a pottery of very early time and important character. ”

“ Chiefly under the direction of one man, it would seem that the produce of the Gubbio furnaces was for the most part of a special nature; namely, a decoration of the pieces with the lustre pigments, producing those brilliant metallic ruby, golden, and opalescent tints which vary in every piece, and which assume almost every colour of the rainbow as they reflect the light directed at varying angles upon their surface. The woodcut (p. 112) represents a vase of great interest and beauty; no. 500 in the South Kensington collection. ”

“ We have no assurance that purely native Roman art ever attained to any very high degree of excellence. The Etruscans and the Greeks in Pagan times, the Byzantine school of the middle ages, and at the period of the renaissance the great Tuscan and Venetian artists worked in Rome upon those monuments of genius of which she is so justly proud; but they are possessions rather than native productions; and it would appear that even in so comparatively small a branch of artistic manufacture she was indebted to a native of Castel Durante for the establishment of a fabrique of maiolica. ”

“ These grotesques are executed with great freedom and force and at the same time with a careful finish and delicacy, and in the manner of an unknown painter who worked at the botega of Camillo Fontana.
It remains to us only to notice the productions of the present day, many of the more meritorious of which are only imitations (in some instances, we regret to say, produced for fraudulent purposes) of the more excellent works of an original period of art: and to give some account of the mode of manufacture, the forms and uses of the pieces, and the manner of their decoration. ”

“ The spirit of the renaissance awakening a passion for the antique declared itself in the numerous representations from Greek and Roman history and mythology, scenes from Homer, the metamorphoses of Ovid, and the like, which formed the main stock subjects for the wares of the Umbrian fabriques, excepting always the sacred histories delineated so admirably by Orazio Fontana and others, from the designs of Raffaelle and his scholars. ”

“ It is true that the first trace of the application of oxide of tin to produce a white opaque glazed surface is to be met with upon Babylonian or Assyrian bricks, but we are disposed to think that it was then merely used as a pigment to produce a white colour, and not as an application to pottery for the production of a white opaque glaze capable of receiving coloured enrichment by painting in other pigments. ”

“ The figures and groups in “biscuit” porcelain, of pure white and stone colour (variations arising from the different degrees of heat to which they were exposed in the oven) were undoubtedly the more important artistic productions of the Roman fabrique; but glazed pottery, very similar in character to that of Leeds or the “Queen’s ware” of the Wedgwoods and known as “terraglia verniciata,” was also made, and in this material statuettes, figures of animals, candelabra, vases, and portrait busts were modelled. ”

“ Birch, in the introduction to his erudite work on ancient pottery, says: “The desire of rendering terra-cotta less porous, and of producing vessels capable of retaining liquids, gave rise to the covering of it with a vitreous enamel or glaze. The invention of glass has hitherto been generally attributed to the Phœnicians; but opaque glasses or enamels as old as the eighteenth dynasty, and enamelled objects as early as the fourth, have been found in Egypt. The employment of copper to produce a brilliant blue coloured enamel was very early, both in Babylonia and Assyria ”

“ After the death of Orazio Fontana and Battista Franco works of an inferior class only were produced from the designs of the Flemish engravers. From 1580 the decline of the art was rapid. It met but small encouragement from duke Francesco Maria II., who succeeded in 1574, except during his residence at Castel Durante where it still, though feebly, survived. He abdicated in favour of the Holy See, and died in 1631. The rich collections of art then remaining at Urbino became the property of Ferdinand de’ Medici, who had married the duke’s granddaughter, and were removed to Florence. ”

“ He who, climbing the steep ascent and tortuous narrow streets, has visited the deserted halls and richly decorated cabinets of her palace, and has travelled through the beauteous scenery of her neighbourhood, to where the delicious valley of the Tiber bursts upon the sight, will never forget the impressions that they leave. ”

“ It is easy to conceive that by scratching a design or pattern through this white applied surface to the darker clay beneath, before fixing in the fire, a ready mode of decoration presented itself without the use of colour, to be covered with but visible through the glaze; hence the early incised or “sgraffiato” ware, one of the primitive modes of decorating glazed pottery.
Passeri states that pottery works existed from remote periods in the neighbourhood of Pesaro, as proved by remains of furnaces and fragments of Roman time and tiles with the stamp of Theodoric ”

“ Under the fabrique of Caffaggiolo we find pieces which may perhaps have been produced under the influence of this member of the family. In form and decoration with grotesques they are a poor reminiscence of the superior works of an earlier period.
The work of another, a later and inferior hand, probably of the Fontana fabrique, is abundant in collections; his manner is between that of the Fontana and of the Patanazzi; free and effective, but loose and careless; the Fontana pigments are used, and occasionally pieces occur painted with greater pains. ”

“ Unfortunately many pieces made in the manufactory at Doccia have, after chipping and scratching, been palmed upon unwary amateurs as ancient specimens by unprincipled dealers at Florence and elsewhere. Some of these modern examples are in the ceramic gallery at South Kensington. The most successful reproduction of the famous lustre has however been made at Gubbio itself by an able young chemist and artist, Luigi Carocci. Some of his productions are excellent, though far from having those artistic qualities so apparent in the finer specimens of maestro Giorgio’s work. ”

“ The introduction of the new enamel, which afforded a better ground for painting, did not cause the use of the bright metallic colours and prismatic glaze to be relinquished at those potteries where it had become established, but it appears to have stimulated a development in the artistic productions of other places, the wares of which before that period were less attractive. The botega of Maestro Giorgio at Gubbio seems to have been at this time the great centre of the process of embellishment with the golden and ruby metallic lustres ”

“ The metallic lustre in decoration was applied, apparently at an early time, to pottery glazed with a siliceous coating, and appears to have established itself in Persia. On specimens from Arabia it is also found, and its use in combination with this glaze may possibly have preceded the manufacture of lustred wares coated with the stanniferous enamel, by the eastern potters of the Balearic islands, Spain, and Sicily. ”

“ The wares were made by covering the crude baked clay with a slip or engobe of white earth, the “terra di San Giovanni” from Siena, or with that of Verona, and glazing it with “marzacotto,” a mixture of oxide of lead, sand and potash. The colours, used were yellow, green, manganese black, and cobalt blue (from the “zaffara” of the Levant) . During the government of the Sforza the manufacture greatly developed and was protected, for on 1st April 1486 a decree was made prohibiting the introduction of earthenwares for sale from other parts, except the jars for oil and water. ”

“ Soft (Fayence à pâte tendre) , and Hard (Fayence à pâte dure) , according to the nature of the composition or the degree of heat under which it has been fired in the kiln. What is known generally in England as earthenware is soft, while stone ware, queen’s ware, &c. are hard. The characteristics of the soft wares are a paste, or body, which may be scratched with a knife or file, and fusibility, generally, at the heat of a porcelain furnace. ”

“ From Castel Durante came the Pelliparii who on establishing themselves at the capital city of the duchy took the name of Fontana, to which is attached some of the greatest triumphs of their art. “Francesco,” the able painter who probably worked at Urbino and afterwards at Monte Bagnolo near Perugia, was as he styled himself “Durantino.” A new life seems to have been given to artistic pottery in Venice by the immigration of a Durantine artist Francesco del Vasaro in 1545 ”

“ But a ware of a different kind formed of a red clay and glazed with a rich treacle-brown or black glaze, the forms of the pieces being sometimes extremely elegant, has been also assigned to this locality. Some of them are enriched with gilding and with subjects painted in oil colours, not by a ceramic artist. We are informed, however, by signor Giuseppe Raffaelli that wares of this description were made at Castel Durante, and that a fine example of them, with portraits of a count Maldini and his wife, is preserved in the library at Urbania. ”

“ The very fine tazza, represented in the woodcut, is a good example. They differ from parallel pieces ascribed to Caffaggiolo in a certain rigidity of modelling, the use of a shading and outline of a darker or more indigo-like blue, and a free application of yellow and orange pigments; a more gothic sentiment also prevails from the influence of the German school, and we find subjects copied or derived from the works of Dürer, Martin Schön, &c., more frequently upon the higher class of Faentine wares than on those of painters working at the more southern centres of the art. ”