BEST goldthwaite The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica 1989

The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica 

Author(s): Richard A. Goldthwaite 

Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 1-32 

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America 

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RENAISSANCE 

QUARTERLY 

RONA GOFFEN 

Edited b)y 

BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS 

Associate Editors 

COLIN EISLER WALLACE T. MACCAFFREY JAMES V. MIROLLO 

The Economic and Social World 

of Italian Renaissance Maiolica* 

by RICHARD 

A. GOLDTHWAITE 

Italian maiolica has a long history extending back into the Middle 

Ages. That history recounts a slow evolutionary process, with 

its main themes being: first, the importation of tin-glazed pottery 

from the Islamic world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which 

has survived primarily as architectural decoration (the bacininserted 

into church facades); secondly, the development of the local production 

of ceramics with lead glazes and then improved tin glazes and 

with modest painted and incised decoration; thirdly, the diffusion of 

that production, presumably from Sicily and southern Italy, 

throughouthe rest of the peninsula; and, finally, beginning in the 

later fourteenth century, the elevation of the quality of production 

to the level of a veritable art form. Our knowledge of this history has 

been amply expanded in the last few years by an extraordinary 

amount of very solid research conducted into the subject by medieval 

archaeologists and by ceramic scholars -many of the latter talented 

amateurs who work on their own local traditions in Italy; and 

this lively interest has had reverberations in both the museum world 

and the art market. The time is ripe to take stock of this historiographical 

situation in order to see how the subject fits into the larger 

*This paper had its original form as a lecture at a symposium on majolica organized 

in April 1987 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Museum. I am 

indebted to Timothy Schroder of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and his colleagues 

for the invitation that generated this work and to the other participants of the 

symposium for their critical comments. 

[ I] 



2 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 

picture of Italian civilization. ' It is the last stage of the evolution of 

maiolica-the period of the Renaissance-that is the subject of this 

article, and the questions to be addressed here are those that occur to 

an economic and social historian. Why, all of a sudden, so much pottery 

and pottery of such high quality and of such various and changing 

styles? How was it that the potter's art rose to such heights? And, 

finally, what does the new demand for this one item, maiolica, tell 

us about the consumer market in general in Renaissance Italy? 

We can start by trying to get some sense of the magnitude of the 

surge in demand for maiolica in the Renaissance. This demand can 

best be measured on the supply side of the market equation by considering 

the evidence for the success of the maiolica industry. Obviously, 

this success is not to be defined just by growth in quantitative 

terms, which in any case can not be known, given the state of 

the documentation for this period. Along with increased production, 

that growth consisted of a number of features: improvement 

in the techniques of the potter's craft, an extraordinary elaboration 

of forms and decoration, the emergence of numerous centers producing 

wares with their own particular qualities, the development 

of a more refined business organization, the achievement of a certain 

prestige status for the industry, and finally, the penetration of production 

even into foreign markets. All these features constitute the 

impressive success of the maiolica industry in Renaissance Italy. 

'The best general surveys of recent archaeological work illuminating the early stages 

of this history of Italian pottery are by Hugo Blake and David Whitehouse. Blake's papers 

include: "Medieval Pottery: Technical Innovation or Economic Change?" British 

Archaeological Reports. Supplementary Ser. 41 (Papers in Italian Archaeology I) 

(1978):435-72; and "The Archaic Majolica of North-Central Italy: Montalcino, Assisi 

and Tolentino," Facnza, 66 (i98o):9i-io6. Whitehouse's papers include: "Medieval 

Pottery in Italy: the Present State of Research," in La ctanmique mediievale en Mediterrane'e 

occidentaleXe-XVesiecles (Paris, i980), pp. 65-82; "Proto-maiolica," Facnza, 66 (i980), 

77-83; "Note sulla ceramica dell'Italia meridionale nei secoli XII-XIV," Faenza, 68 

(1982):185-96; "La Liguria e la ceramica medievale nel Mediterraneo," in Atti del IV 

Convegno Internazionale della Ceranmica (Albisola, 1971) 265-86 (henceforth: Atti Albisola). 

The bibliography on Renaissance maiolica is too vast to cite here, consisting as it 

does of so many items widely scattered in publications ranging from exhibition catalogues 

to articles in localjournals, many of which have escaped the attention of the standard 

art-historical bibliographical guides. Only a small part of this material is cited in the 

notes below, since much of it regards purely stylistic problems. Two recent catalogues 

are useful for their bibliographies: Wendy M. Watson, Italian Renaissance Maiolicafrom 

the William C. Clark Collection (London, i986), and Timothy Wilson, Ceramic Art of the 

Italian Renaissance (London, 1987). 



ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 3 

The objects themselves give us the best evidence for industrial 

growth-the objects, that is, considered not individually as works 

of art but collectively as industrial production. First of all is the obvious 

improvement in technology. "The history of Italian malolica," 

wrote Bernard Rackham, one of the founders of modern 

scholarship on the subject, "is one of continuous advance, with a 

steadily improving technique. "2 The discovery of how to make tin 

glaze was itself the fundamental breakthrough that got the industry 

going in the first place. Then, from about the mid-fourteenth century 

onwards, the palette of colors was enlarged beyond the traditional 

manganese purple and copper green with the addition of cobalt 

blue, yellow from antimony, and orange from iron-rust; and 

some shops could produce crimson. Painters blended these colors to 

produce various shades and tones and used other pigments to yield 

black and white. Moreover, Italian potters, ever-ready to accept 

challenges from exotic products from abroad, learned how to produce 

all kinds of luster effects and experimented with the making of 

porcelain. Kiln technology improved, too, both to enhance finishes 

that were more sensitive to firing and to reduce breakage of products 

that represented a larger investment of materials and labor and that 

required two and sometimes even three firings. 

We might expect that the improvement in technology in a growth 

industry engendered a sense of what today would be called trade secrets, 

whether because of sharper competition in an expanding market 

or because of the enhanced artisan pride in more highly developed 

and individualized skills. In thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury 

Iran lusterware, production was a closely guarded 

monopoly of a few families. A similar secrecy in the Italian industry 

when at its height presented some difficulties for Cipriano Piccolpasso, 

who set about, in the mid-sixteenth century, to write the first 

technical treatise on maiolica, entitled Three Books of the Potter's Art. 

Piccolpasso, not being a potter by profession, felt compelled to address 

the problem of secrecy right off, in the prologue to his book; 

and he clearly felt put on the defensive by it. On the one hand, he 

feared being charged with revealing trade secrets; on the other hand, 

he in fact suspected he might not have learned everything about his 

subject, since, as he remarked, some potters keep their secrets until 

2Bernard Rackham, Italian Maiolica (London, i963) 3. Technology is the least studied 

and understood aspect of maiolica, and one looks forward to the study of istoriato work 

from this point of view by David Kingery of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 




the day of their death, when finally-and only on the death bedthey 

reveal them to their sons. This problem of secrecy seems to 

have bothered Piccolpasso most in his attempts to learn about kiln 

technology. In his discussion of the subject he observes that some 

potters keep constant guard over their kilns, and he is at pains to assure 

his reader that he has revealed all he has learned on the subject, 

the implication clearly being that in fact he may not have been told 

everything by his informants. 3 

A necessary concomitanto improvements in kiln and color technology 

in the development of the ceramicist's art in the Renaissance 

was the rise in the level of artisan skills, and improved technology 

challenged no one more than the painter. He needed greater dexterity 

in the first placejust to paint on the unfired tin-glaze, but further 

ambitions were aroused as a whole new world of decorative possibilities 

opened up to him on the surface of these ceramic objects. The 

potter perfected his technique as a figure painter to achieve gradations 

in the use of colors for modelling and the simulation of relief. 

Moreover, as he explored this new visual world, he increasingly felt 

pressures to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation that was taking 

place in the other visual arts of Renaissance Italy. Thus, as many 

have observed, Italian maiolica-at least in its early, Renaissance 

phase, before the introduction of the compendiario style-was essentially 

a painter's pottery; that it became so, in contrasto the earlier 

history of ceramics in both the Near and Far East, isjust another index 

to the extent of visual culture in Renaissance Italy. It must have 

been the pride of these modest artisans, in fact, that prompted many 

ofthem to leave individual marks and even signatures on their work, 

something rarely if ever found on the pottery of other places, for instance 

that of the medieval Islamic world. Some potters from Montelupo 

and Cafaggiolo (near Florence) and from Deruta habitually 

left marks not on the underside of their work but on an exposed surface, 

worked into the decoration for all to see; and the famous vase 

painter Orazio Fontana enjoyed hiding his initialsomewhere in the 

elaborate scenes of his istoriato work. In any case, the dynamic of 

change arising from the improved skills and changing fashions ofthe 

painter is another mark of industrial growth. 

3The authoritative edition of Piccolpasso is now The Three Books of the Potter's Art, 

trans. and introd. Ronald Lightbown and Alan Caiger-Smith (London, i980). 




Growth is also reflected in the emergence of a large number of distinctly 

identifiable centers of production and in the seemingly infinite 

expansion of the range of their products. Before the midfourteenth 

century, pottery is classified into the general categories of 

incised slipware, archaic maiolica, and the so-called proto-maiolica; 

and all this production, with its limited range of colors and decoration, 

can be lumped together according to geographically extensive 

regions -namely, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria-Lazio, 

and south Italy, especially Puglia and Sicily. By the Renaissance, 

however, these regional categories no longer work: the map becomes 

much more complicated with the rise and decline of a large 

number of individual centers throughouthe peninsula, each with its 

own production characterized by highly distinctive qualities. Pottery 

found throughout medieval Tuscany, for instance, is fairly homogeneous, 

but from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, distinct 

centers of prestige production emerge at Siena, Pisa, Montelupo, 

and Cafaggiolo.4 Likewise in the state of Urbino, each center of production- 

Casteldurante, Gubbio, Pesaro, and Urbino itself- had 

its own specialized characteristics. Just to read out the names of the 

chief centers of Renaissance maiolica is to evoke the enormous variety 

that is one of the delights of this art form: Deruta with its 

golden-yellow wares, Florence with its heavy blue relief, Gubbio 

with its red metallic glazes, Siena with its distinctive red, Venice 

with its grayish-blue, the Metauro region with the polychromatic 

fantasies of the istoriato style and the elaborate plastic forms of its late 

production. In the last few years an impressive amount of archaeological 

and documentary research as well as more careful visual 

analysis by Italian scholars have put the individuality of many other 

centers into prominent relief. 

This concentration of prestige production in a number of small 

rural places occurred presumably because of access to betteraw materials, 

especially clays and fuel, to improve the quality of production. 

In other words, industrial development brought the forces of 

geographical determinis more prominently into play-a subject 

that seems not to have been discussed in the literature. This relocation 

of producers to rural places, most of which were in remote 

mountainous regions, occurred despite the consequent rise in trans- 

4Riccardo Francovich, La ceramica medievale a Siena e nella Toscana meridionale (secc. 

XIV-XV) (Florence, 1982) chap. 2; idem and Sauro Gelichi, La ceramica medievale nelle 

raccolte del Museo Medievale e Moderno di Arezzo (Florence, 1983) 50-52. 




portation costs to get their fragile products to the expanding urban 

markets all over Italy. 

Along with the emergence of highly specialized centers of production, 

the forms and decoration to be found in the wares of any 

one center get out of'morphological control as time advances. 

Whereas the range of earlier production has been neatly delineated 

by archaeologists, Renaissance wares simply defy categorization; 

despite some heroic scholarly efforts to impose some kind of order 

on the bewildering variety of products. Piccolpasso himself appended 

a kind of catalogue at the end of his treatise listing some fifteen 

different kinds of standard decoration to be found on wares 

made in the Metauro region alone. Paride Berardi, anxious to get a 

grip on the production of Pesaro, has come up with a morphology 

of four styles -but then goes on to break these down into 20 subdivisions 

and 57 further subdivisions.s Tiziano Mannoni has proposed 

a morphology for Ligurian production of four general categories, 

eight sub-categories, 36 further subdivisions, and 95 

"types"; and then, as if this were not enough, he goes on to propose 

iT basic forms and 23 categories of decoration- only to conclude that 

it is not yet possible to formulate a synthesis (the implication being 

that all that is needed is a little more work!).6 Galeazzo Cora's classification 

for Montelupo wares consists of i9 groups and si categories, 

not to mention subcategories.7 Perhaps this baffling proliferation 

of decorative types 'that accompanied the dissolution of the 

broadly regional medieval categories and the appearance of the very 

particular production of many centers is to be seen as just another 

expression of the famed "individualism" of Renaissance Italy. For 

the economic historian, however, this expanding and everchanging 

kaleidoscope of new products signals considerable industrial 

imagination in response to radically new market behavior. 

All these developments of the maiolica industry can be inferred 

from what we might call the archaeological record -that is, from 

the evidence of the extant pottery itself. This evidence points to increased 

investment in the industry and higher cost of the finished 

product. The two firings required to produce maiolica increased 

5L'antica maiolica di Pesaro dal XIV al XVII secolo (Florence, 1984) chap. 7. 

6"La ceramica medievale a Genova e nella Liguria," Studigenuensi, 7 (i968-69): i0- 

I30. 

7Storia delta maiolica di Firenze del contado, secoli XIV-XV (Florence, 1973) vol. I, 

487-88. 




both fuel costs and the risk of loss through breakage; and the production 

of lusterware had to sustain the additional expense of materials, 

sophisticated equipment, and yet another firing. Tin, cobalt 

blue, and other raw materials for glazes and pigments had to be imported 

from abroad. Transportation costs rose with the concentration 

of production in centers remote from urban markets. Finally, 

the skilled labor of the painter needed for the elaboration of decoration 

was the biggest factor in increasing production costs, perhaps 

by as much as fifty percent. Obviously, all these increased costs of 

production were sustained because of new opportunities for profit 

in an expanding market. 

Archival research has produced further evidence, beyond that of 

the archaeological record, for the impressive growth of the ceramic 

industry at the end of-the Middle Ages. Tax rolls and notarial documents 

reveal an ever-increasing number of potters of all kinds and 

document their relative prosperity. Notwithstanding the demographic 

decline of Italian towns, guilds and confraternities of potters 

are mentioned with increasing frequency from the early fourteenth 

century onwards, a sure sign that their numbers had reached the 

point where potters felt the need to organize themselves formally.8 

Some towns passed legislation to protec their home industry from 

foreign competition by limiting imports;9 and as the taste for these 

wares became more general, yet other towns with no native industry 

and anxious to get one going encouraged the immigration ofpotters 

(especially from Faenza) by offering them monopoly rights, 

protection from imports, citizenship privileges, and immunities 

from various kinds of taxes. '0 

8The towns with guilds are listed by Pietro Marsilli, "Ars orcelariorunm: 

corporazione 

dei maiolicari di Faenza," Faeniza, 68 (i982):L5. 

9For Fano: Giuseppe Castellani, "L'arte ceramica a Fano, " Faeniza, 9 (I93 i):62ff. For 

Pesaro: Giuseppe M. Albarelli, Ceramistipesaresi nei documenti notarili dell'Archivio di Stato 

diPesaro, secc. XV-XVII(Bologna, I986) 138-39, 154-55, 193-94. For Siena: Gabriella 

Picinni, "Per lo studio della produzione di ceramica e vetro nella prima meta del Quattrocento, 

" Archeologia medievale, 8 (I 98 I):59o. For Venice: Angelica Alvera Bortolotto, 

Maioliche veneziane (Florence, I987) 6-7. 

'"For Bologna: Lino Sighinolfi, "Per la storia dell'arte ceramica," Faeniza, 4 

(I9I6):8I. For Fano: Berardi, Maiolica di Pesaro 49. For Grand-ducal Florence: Galeazzo 

Cora, "Sulla fabbrica di maioliche sorta in Pisa alla fine del '500," Faenza, S? (i964):25- 

30. For Imola: Giuseppe Liverani, "La ceramica in Imola," Faenza, 42 (1956):7. For 

Mantua: Giuseppe Campori, Maiolica e porcellana di Ferrara nei secoli XVe XVI (Pesaro, 

I 879) 79. For Milan: Guido Donatone, "Contributo sulla maiolica napoletana del XVI 

secolo," Antichita viva, no. 3 (1976):34. For Pavia: Sergio Nepoti, "Ceramiche a Pavia 




Another mark of industrial growth, going beyond the quantitative 

expansion and beyond the qualitative improvement of production, 

is the extent to which producers refined their business organization 

to operate more efficiently. At a time when in northern 

Europe potters operated at the modest level of a cottage industry, 

still tied into the agricultural sector, many Italian potters became 

veritablentrepreneurs. They show up in tax records with enough 

wealth to rank with the most respectable of artisans. In the I 489 tax 

lists for the small production center of Deruta, the Macci, a family 

of manufacturers, had the highest assessment; they owned three 

workshops, a kiln, clay pits, and a woods -in other words, the entire 

process of production was in their hands. I I We hear of one shop 

in mid-sixteenth century Faenza that had three kilns and seven 

lathes;12 and a I556 inventory of the Calamelli shop, also at Faenza, 

lists over 20,000 items divided into over 6o categories of objects. '3 

Surviving contracts indicate the high level and sophistication of 

some of these operations: a five-year supply contract (Faenza, 1540) 

for white glaze to be paid for in annual installments;I4 production 

contracts (Faenza, mid-sixteenth century) for 3500 items in two 

months and for 7,000 items in four months;I5 a contract (Savona, 

seventeenth century) for the consignment of wares by the producer 

in exchange for a share of eventual sales; i6 a I 586 convention with 

a merchanto supply the market at Naples every month for seven 

years;I7 an agreement among producers (Faenza, I497) to regulate 

their activities in their common interests, with especially harsh measures 

against those who did not subscribe to the agreement;'8 a kind 

of "lockout" agreement among five producers (Urbino, I530) for 

dal secolo XV al XVII, " in Pavia Pinacoteca Malaspina (Pavia, I981) 70. For Venice: Alvera 

Bortolotto, Storia della ceramica a Venezia dagli albori alla fine della Repubblica (Florence, 

I98I) I8-20. 

"Tiziani Biganti, "La produzione di ceramica a lustro a Gubbio e a Deruta tra la fine 

del secolo XV e l'inizio del secolo XVI-primi risultati di una ricerca documentaria," 

Facnza, 73 (I987):209-25. 

"2Pietro Marsilli, "I servizi compendiari faentini, " Atti Albisola, I5 (i982):3 I. 

'3Pub. by Carlo Grigioni, "Documenti: serie faentina," Faenza, 22 (1934):143-53. 

14Marsilli, "Servizi compendiari," 3 I. 

I5Ibid. 

'6Carlo Varaldo, "L'esportazione di ceramica savonese nella documentazione archivistica 

del XVII secolo," Atti Albisola, S (1972):342-44. 

'7Antichi documenti sulla ceramica di Castelli (Citta di Castello, i985) 135. 

'8Gaetano Ballardini, "Una cooperativa fra maiolicari e un 'boicotaggio' nel Quattrocento 

faentino, " Faenza, 33 (1947):I 14-19. 




common action against a number of skilled workers who were agitating 

for higher wages; '9 a contract (Gubbio, I50 I) for the ten-year 

collaboration between the owners of two separate workshops (including 

the famous Maestro Giorgio) solely for the production and 

sale of lusterware while remaining independent in the internal operation 

of their own shops;20 and, finally, numerous labor subcontracts 

for the work of painters. One fifteenth-century account 

book of a ceramic painter actually survives as testimony to procedures 

for keeping track of the busy activity of this kind of worker.21 

Potters commonly organized themselves into formal partnerships, 

by which they were able to pool thei resources and even attract capital 

for their operations from outsiders. And the industry was obviously 

sufficiently lucrative to attract capitalists with money to invest: 

in one oft-cited instance, a Florentine from one of the city's 

patrician familieset up what has been called a trust by making a collective 

contract for the purchase of the entire production of no fewer 

than 23 potters of Montelupo for three years.22 

In the middle-sized city of Faenza, pottery became a major industry. 

Already in the second half of the fourteenth century, production 

levels there were high enough to provide the governors of the city 

with a major source for tax revenues. This production was directed 

to markets all over northern Italy, and in many of these markets the 

imports from Faenza became a major target of protective legislation 

by towns that sought to encourage their own industry. But Faentine 

potters were not to be put off by these trade barriers going up all 

around them at an increasing pace toward the end of the fifteenth 

century: they themselves followed this trade, emigrating and setting 

up shops abroad to take advantage of the market opportunities that 

were opening up everywhere. The extraordinary development of 

the ceramics industry in Faenza, with the growing chasm between 

entrepreneurs and dependent workers, has in fact been cited as one 

of the economic and social conditions favoring the spread of heresy 

there in the sixteenth century.23 

'9Franco Negroni, "Niccolo Pellipario: ceramista fantasma, " Notizie da Palazzo Albani, 

14 (I985):I8 n. 33. 

20Biganti, "Produzione a Gubbio." 

2"This manuscript, at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche at Faenza, has never 

been published; see Melisanda Lama, It libro dei conti di un maiolicaro del Quattrocento 

(Faenza, I939). 

22Cora, Maiolica di Firenze 1:422-23. 

23Pietro Marsilli, "Da Faenza in Moravia: ceramiche e ceramisti fra storia dell'arte e 

storia della riforma popolare," Atti Albisola, i8 (I985):12. 



lo RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 

The communal government of Faenza clearly recognized the importance 

of this industry to the local economy: on the one hand, it 

legislated to regulate the industry at home in the public interest; and, 

on the other hand, at least in one instance involving Venice, it promoted 

sales abroad by incorporating clauses into a treaty to gain special 

commercial privileges for Faentine products in foreign territory. 

The city fathers also presented dignitaries abroad with official 

gifts of majolica from the home town, probably hoping that these 

prestige products would help promote sales abroad, if not tip the 

diplomatic scales in their favor. The adeptness of Faentine potters in 

keeping ahead of foreign imitation of their products and in responding 

to changing fashions accounts for the city's continuing preeminence 

in the history of Italian majolica and fully justifies the appropriation 

of the city's name for the product itself. Their creation 

of a distinctive whiteware in the second half of the sixteenth century-the 

compendiario style-was a virtual revolution in ceramics 

that established a tradition of taste for "faience" that spread throughout 

Europe and lasted until the rise of English potteries at the end of 

the eighteenth century.24 

With the mention of prestige we run up against one of those qualities 

of an industry that is difficulto evaluate in purely economic 

terms. Although the production of maiolica may not have been very 

important in the overall economic life of any Italian city other than 

Faenza, the industry came to have a cachet about it that is another 

aspect of its extraordinary growth in the Renaissance. Why else 

would so many minor towns around Faenza, like Fano and Imola, 

go to such lengths to promote a small industry, on the one hand 

erecting barriers against importation of Faentine wares, and on the 

other hand encouraging the immigration of Faentine craftsmen to 

set up a local industry? In the early sixteenth century, Bologna, just 

up the road from Faenza, erected import barriers against Faentineware 

in order to protect local producers; but apparently when the 

city fathers realized that local production was not up to the challenge, 

they reversed their tactics and tried to lure potters from 

Faenza by offering them citizenship and tax advantages. 25 The hope 

was that these Faentines would make the beautiful quality products 

24Much of the material on Faenza is surveyed by Carlo Grigioni, La bottega del vasaio 

del be! tempo (Faenza, 1937). Subsequent issues of Facoza are rich in publication of documents 

on the industry in this city. 

25Sighinolfi, "Arte ceramica" 8i. 



ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA II 

for which their native city was famous; and in I545, a Bolognese 

chroniclereported with much satisfaction the opening of the first 

shop of maiolica, where a particularly large number of vases, bowls, 

and plates went on display to show they were in fact the equal of 

Faentine wares -not the kind of event that usually gets recorded in 

chronicles of the period. 26 When the above-mentioned Macci, an old 

family of ceramicists of Deruta but by now residents of Perugia, 

made application for citizenship in Perugia in I498, the petition was 

decorated with the drawing of a pitcher and proudly declared them 

producers of beautiful and completely original products that were 

sold throughouthe world and that increased the glory and fame of 

Perugia to the admiration of all who appreciated lusterware (laboreria 

maiolicata).27 

The princes of Italy, once they had raised the stakes oftheir intense 

political competition with one another to include art patronage in 

general, were quick to recognize the prestige value of locally produced 

maiolica for the enhancement of their reputations. Petty despots 

like Costanzo Sforza and Roberto Malatesta, who ruled over 

towns in the Romagna where maiolica was produced, did not hesitate 

to send samples as gifts to a man with such discriminating taste 

as Lorenzo the Magnificent and to the pope himself. By the sixteenth 

century, there was hardly a prince in Italy who did not attempto 

attract potters to his capital either to stimulate the local economy by 

introducing a new industry or to set up a court kiln for the private 

production of highly prestigious products. Some of these princes 

clearly had the additional interest in developing the commercial possibilities 

of this new taste.28 

Perhaps the most stunning success in the growth of this industry, 

finally, was its ability to compete against imported wares to the 

point of driving them out of the Italian market altogether and, eventually, 

of invading the very markets abroad whence these foreign 

products came. Earlier in the Middle Ages, before Italians knew 

anything about making tin-glazed pottery, they imported wares 

26"6Documenti, " Faenza, I (I 913):17- I 8. 

27Biganti, "Produzione a Gubbio" 215. 

28For Florence: Cora, "Fabbrica di maioliche." For Ferrara: Grazia Biscontini 

Ugolini, "Un nuovo pezzo del celebre servizio nuziale di Alfonso II d'Este," Rassegna 

distudi edi notizie, 3 (1975):158-6o. For Ferrara, Mantua, and Savoy: Campori, Maiolica 

di Ferrara 68, 79-83. 




from the Islamic world, primarily from North Africa; but by the 

fourteenth century, this trade had dried up as Italians learned to 

make these things for themselves. Then, in the later Middle Ages, 

Italy was hit by second wave of imports, this time the lusterware 

from another part of the Islamic world, Moorish Spain. 29 This production, 

sponsored by strong economic interests in Valencia- 

Manises, enjoyed extraordinary success in the Italian market 

(where, in fact, the term maiolica originally referred only to it). Merchants 

(like Francesco Datini of Prato) as well as nobles sent orders 

to Spain for pieces with their family coat-of-arms; and a 1480 inventory 

of the Pisan residence of one rather middling Florentine merchant 

reveals no fewer than 55 items of Hispano-moresque ware. 30 

By this time, however, Italian maiolica was evolving in its familiar 

Renaissance forms, and what happened in the market is instructive 

for our understanding of the vitality of the Italian as compared to the 

Spanish industry. Italians met the competition by doing imitations, 

but their imitations are vague at best, not really very deliberate. 31 If 

Italian artisans did not really take the task of imitation very seriously, 

it was because their decorative imagination was not to be restrained 

by the limitations of Hispano-moresque style. Thus, while on the 

one hand the conservative craftsmen of Spain, for all the international 

success their products enjoyed, remained stubbornly attached 

to their traditional designs, on the other hand, Italians, once having 

learned to produce luster effects, gave free range to their decorative 

talents, demonstrating a marked proclivity for originality. Characteristically, 

too, the Italians sought to improve the quality of luster 

glazes, one craftsman in mid-sixteenth-century Pesaro even going 

so far as to experiment with the effects of the application of pure gold 

on his pieces prior to firing. 32 The result of all this innovation was 

29A concise survey of this production is Hugo Blake, "La ceramica medievale spagnola 

e la Liguria," Atti Albisola, 5 (L972):55-96; and for exports abroad, see esp. the 

contributions of Francovich and Gelichi, Berti and Tongiorgi, Hurst, and Nepoti in Segundo 

coloquio internacional de cerdmica medieval en el Mediterrdneo occidental (Madrid, i986). 

3?Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410 (Boston, 

i986) 89; Marco Spallanzani, "Maiolica di Valenza e di Montelupo in una casa pisana del 

1480, " Faenza, 72 ( I986): I 64-69. 

3IAround 1400 Benedetto di Baldassare Ubriachi wrote down instructions for making 

lusterware, but he was not at all well informed on the matter; it was not until the very 

end of the century that the technique was used at Deruta. Alan Caiger-Smith, Lustre Pottery: 

Technique, Tradition and Innovation in Islam and the Western World (London, i985) 

127-28. 

32Giuliana Gardelli, 'A granfuoco': mostra di maioliche rinascimentali dello stato di Urbino 

da collezioni private (Urbino, I 987) 17- I 8. 




exactly what you might expect: the Spaniardsimply got left behind 

by ever-changing Italian fashion and eventually lost out in the market 

not only in Italy but elsewhere as well. 

The Italian industry, moreover, went on to take the next step: 

having pushed out imports from local markets, Italians began to export 

their products abroad, to Cairo and north Africa, to Spain and 

thence even to the New World, and to the kingdoms north of the 

Alps. By the sixteenth century, Italian artisans themselves were emigrating 

to various French cities and to Antwerp to set up shop closer 

to those growing markets. The abortive efforts of the French to do 

something on their own with the production of Palissy, Saint Porchaire, 

and Limoges wares indicates something about how far behind 

they were in the sixteenth century; and it was a long time before 

northern Europeans in general caught up by successfully producing 

their own tin-glazed pottery. The genealogy of that eventual production 

not only in France and Flanders but also in Holland, England, 

Germany, and eastern Europe, has been traced back, directly 

or indirectly, to the arrival of Italian potters north of the Alps. In 

short, the Italians turned the table on the Moslems, who had been the 

firsto produce high quality tin-glazed pottery in the earlier Middle 

Ages. In the Renaissance, Italian products could be found in markets 

all over the Mediterranean and northern Europe; and the whiteware 

they introduced in the sixteenth century captured European taste for 

the next two centuries. In modern terms, the success of the maiolica 

industry, 

a small way at least, helped tip the international balance 

of payments in Italy's favor.33 

33J. M. Baart, "Ceramiche italiane rinvenute in Olanda e le prime imitazioni olandesi, 

" Atti Albisola, i6 (I983): I6 1-70; Hugo Blake, "Pottery Exported from Northwest 

Italy between 145o and I830: Savona, Albisola, Genoa, Pisa, and Montelupo," in G. 

Barker and R. Hodges, eds., Archaeology and Italian Society: Prehistoric, Roman, and Medieval 

Studies, vol. 102 of British Archaeological Record. International Series ( I98I), pp. 99- 

124; Claire Dumortier, "Les faienciers italiens a Anvers au XVIe siecles: aspects historiques," 

Faenza, 73 (i987): I6I-70; Roland Pierre Gayraud, "Importations de 

ceramique occidentale dans l'Empire des Mamelouks," in La ceramnica mnedievale nel niediterraneoccidentale 

(Florence, I986) 6i i; Hurst, "Produzioni locali e mercato. La transizione 

tra Medio Evo e post Medio Evo nella ceramica europea occidentale e transalpina," 

Atti Albisola, 8 (1975): 31-38; F. C. Lister and R. H. Lister, "Ligurian Maiolica 

in Spanish America," ibid., 9 (1976):3 11-17; J. V. G. Mallet, "L'importazione della 

maiolica italiana in Inghilterra," ibid., 5 (1972):25 I-56; Charles L. Redman, "The Role 

of Italian Tradeware in an Early i6th Century North African Colony," Archeologia medievale, 

9 (I982):227-36; Varaldo, "L'esportazione di ceramica savonese"; F. Vindry, 

"Les ceramiques italiennes medievales en Provence orientale," Atti Albisola, S 

(1972):241-47; and for central and eastern Europe, the issue of AttiAlbisola, i8 (I985). 




We should not exaggerate the economic importance of the 

growth of this industry: it goes without saying that for all this expansion 

ceramics constituted a mere sliver in the overall economic 

pie of Renaissance Italy. It was a major industry only in a handful of 

very small rural places and injust one middling city, Faenza. Moreover, 

nowhere was the single enterprise heavily-enough capitalized 

to give rise to anything like a factory: no artisan, even in partnership 

with others, could hope to amass much working capital, and curiously, 

except for state operationsponsored by princes (and perhaps 

the Cafaggiolo kilns of a cadet branch of the Medici), the industry 

does not seem to have attracted much investment from the rich. No 

potter, therefore, could really hope to advance beyond the artisan 

stage of production to become an industrialist or entrepreneur on a 

large scale, although a few, like several of the painters at Urbino and 

Maestro Giorgio of Gubbio, undoubtedly had a certain status as a 

result of their own cultural pretensions and their association with 

princes. Even in Faenza, for all the importance of maiolica to the economic 

life of the city, only two potters ever achieved enough status 

to make it into the ruling elite, and the second was the son of the 

other and achieved this status (in i609) over objections to his "vile" 

profession only because he had the support of the cardinalegate and 

the brother of the pope. 34 If a potter had the ambition to raise the 

social level of his sons and the means to do something about it, helike 

Maestro Giorgio, who actually began to use an aristocratic surname 

toward the end of his life -saw to it that they got out of the 

pottery industry and received the kind of professional education, in 

law or medicine, needed to rise on the social ladder, preferably entering 

into the government service of a prince. 35 The Renaissance 

came before the Industrial Revolution, and it was to be a long time 

before that wheeler-dealer Josiah Wedgwood first developed some 

of the high-powered sales techniques to push his pottery that have 

since become the principal dynamic of the consumer economy of 

our own times, not to mention the lack in Renaissance Italy of any 

34Pietro Marsilli, "La ceramica faentina nei suoi rapporti col potere pubblico," 

Faetiza, 68 (I982): i64. For an example of a potter at Pesaro whose family entered the 

nobility, see Albarelli, B. Boninii and C. F. Bonini, "Documenti," Faelza, 24 

(L936):III. 

35C. F. Bonini, "Maestro Giorgio da Ugubbio ed i lustri a riflessi metallici, " Faeliza, 

19 (1930):90. 




thing like Wedgwood's innovations in assembly-line techniques of 

production. The road to wealth and social status in Renaissance Italy 

was not paved with maiolica. 

Yet, in about every way we have for measuring the success of an 

industry, the story of maiolica in the Renaissance is impressive: the 

number of producers and centers increased, technology advanced, 

business organization was refined, government protection and even 

encouragement were often forthcoming, product variation and diversification 

expanded infinitely, the heightened pace of product 

change stimulated further demand, and the commercial success of its 

products extended even to markets abroad. In all this, producers 

may have felt something ofthe entrepreneur's consciousness of market 

development. Most impressive of all, finally, was improvement 

in the quality of the human capital invested in the industry: that is to 

say, artisans became more skilled, more specialized in their functions; 

and with the expansion of opportunities they were challenged 

to a better performance and, most important of all, to a more creative 

use of their artistic imagination. 

* * * * * 

This observation leads to some fundamental questions about the 

extraordinary success of the industry. What accounts for its vitality 

as compared to the industry in the earlier world of medieval Islam, 

where, after all, tin-glazed pottery has is oldest and one of its grandest 

traditions? And why did the industry flourish in Italy and not in 

other European countries until much later? Such questions draw us 

to the demand side of the luxury market of Renaissance Italy; and 

confronted with demand, we find ourselves up against one of the 

most intractable subjects the economic historian has to deal with. 

The intention here is not to offer a universal explanation for the 

rise of the potter's art in Renaissance Italy: that would be beyond 

anyone's ability in the sense that there is, after all, no real explanation 

for why artistic imagination flourishes in certain periods and in certain 

places and not in others, just as there is no accounting for taste. 

Instead, we shall direct attention to the economic and social forces 

that impinged on demand; and if these forces do not "explain" this 

demand satisfactorily, perhaps a consideration of them will at least 



i6 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 

help to place Italian maiolica in the broader context of the luxury 

market in which it flourished. 36 

The easiest way to get a grip on the demand for any product is to 

ask about its function. Production of maiolica was directed to various 

uses: above all as tableware, but also as floor and wall tiles, as 

devotional objects ranging from ex-votos to Della Robbia reliefs, as 

containers for drugs and spices in pharmacy shops, and as inkwells, 

candlesticks, statuettes, and other such decorative objects that one 

might find scattered throughouthe home and all this diversification 

is another mark of the industry'success. Of these products, 

pharmacy containers and tableware were quantitatively the most 

important. The increased demand for the former can probably be 

linked to the growth in the number and wealth of hospitals in Italian 

towns in the later Middle Ages and to the emergence of these institutions 

as prominent public monuments with a distinctive architectural 

presence, above all withtheir street loggias and chapels, while 

inside these complexes one of the most important public places was 

the pharmacy. 37Private pharmacies, too, were numerous.38 The social 

importance of the pharmacy as the place where one consulted 

"6Medieval archaeologists have been more sensitive than scholars of Renaissance ceramics 

to the relation between changes in form and quality of pottery to economic and 

social chanige: see esp., for Italy, Hugo Blake, "Technology, Supply or Demand," Medieval 

Ceramics, 4 ( I98o):3 - I; and his various other studies, some cited herein. For north 

Europe, see Christopher Dyer, "Social and Economic Changes in the Later Middle Ages 

and the Pottery of the Period," ibid., 6 (i982), and H. E. Jean Le Patourel, "Pottery as 

Evidence for Social and Economic Change," in P. H. Sawyer, ed., Medieval Settlement: 

Continuity and Change (London, 1976). Of considerable interest also, for the evidence 

bacini provide for the wider commercial interests of one great medieval Italian port, is 

David Abulafia, "The Pisan Bacini and the Medieval Mediterranean Economy: A Historian's 

Viewpoint," rept. in his Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean, 1100-1400 (London, 

I988). 

37For hospitals in Florence, see Katherine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance 

Florence (Princeton, i985) ioi-6; and for their architectural development see R. A. 

Goldthwaite and W. R. Rearick, "Michelozzo and the Ospedale di San Paolo in Florence," 

Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 21 (1977):275-8o. 

38Cora, Maiolica di Firenze 1:239-40, lists 34 pharmacy shops (identified by signs) in 

fifteenth-century Florence. The enormous demand of a private pharmacy in late fourteenth-century 

Imola has been studied from its account books by Eros Biavati, "La medievale 

maiolica arcaica fabbricata a Imola dal 1356 al 1367. . .," Atti Albisola, I3 

(ig8o):253-54; and a 1424 inventory of a private pharmacy in Florence has been published 

by Marco Spallanzani, Ceramiche orientali a Firenze nel Rinascimento (Florence, 

1978) 155-58. Cora's study documents purchases by hospital pharmacies. Of interest 

also is the exhibition catalogue Unafarmacia preindustriale 

Valdelsa: la spezieria e lo spedale 

di Santa Fina nella citta di San Gimignano, secc. XI V-X VIII (San Gimignano, I98I). 




with a doctor39 led to its extensive and characteristic embellishment 

with elaborately-worked wood shelving and conspicuous ceramic 

containers for the display of drugs. Moreover, the prestige of the 

court pharmacy in the sixteenth century, which became the focus for 

many an Italian prince' secret pursuit of an interest 

alchemy, gave 

an additional impetus to the demand for appropriate furnishings, including 

drug jars. The social history of the pharmacist'shop as distinct 

from the history of drugs and medicine has, however, yet to be 

written. 

It is safe to say that most of the objects we have in mind when we 

talk about maiolica were originally to be found in the dining room, 

although there is some question whether the most elaborately decorated 

and extravagantly modelled pieces found in the istoriato style 

and in Medici porcelain may not have been made for spectacular display 

as gifts on such occasions as births and marriages or simply as 

objects of virtui, and whether in fact such pieces were ever used at 

table. 40 As a new item on the market, maiolica satisfiedemand for 

tableware of intermediate value. In the Middle Ages, most tableware 

was simply utilitarian, limited in forms, and for the most part 

made of wood and glazed terracotta of the so-called archaic, or 

proto-maiolica, kind; elsewhere in Europe, pewter was widely 

used, but in Italy, which has no natural deposits of tin, pewter was 

a fairly expensive-item, having to be imported. The tables of the very 

few who were rich enough to afford it, of course, displayed silver 

and even gold plates and vessels, at least on those occasions that 

called for the conspicuous display of wealth associated with high status. 

One plausible explanation for the growth of demand for maiolica, 

therefore, might be the rise of a middling class of men who 

wanted to eat off something a little better than wooden plates and 

crude pottery but could not afford gold and silver wares. 

39Park, Doctors and Medicine i09-i0. 

40J. V. G. Mallet, the leading authority on the istoriato style, tends to think that even 

these elaborately decorated pieces were made for use, even though many show little 

signs of wear: "The Gonzaga and Ceramics," in David Chambers andJane Martineau, 

eds., Splendors of the Gonzaga (Milan, i98I) 42. Mallet has also speculated that the proliferation 

of forms, which created problems for this kind of pictorial decoration, is to be 

explained by their functional use: "Gonzaga Patronage of Maiolica," Apollo II4 

(i98 I):i62-63. Marco Spallanzani has unequivocally stated the practical function of imported 

Chinese porcelain on the table of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany: Ceramiche orientali 

I30. 



i8 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 

In fact, the period in which industrial growth got underway, the 

second half of the fourteenth century, was one which saw an increase 

in per capita wealth, a rise in wages and prosperity in general 

throughout Italy. This was partly the consequence of the dramatic 

fall in population, especially with the Black Death of I348, so that 

the accumulated wealth of centuries was now divided among fewer 

people; and with fewer people to feed, food prices fell in relation to 

wages, leaving men with more disposable income to spend for 

things other than life's necessities. Moreover, the period saw an impressive 

increase in the number of men in the middling rank of 

skilled workers. The growth in all those luxury industries we associate 

with the Renaissance-painting, sculpture, architecture, and 

the so-called minor arts - called into existence a greater number and 

variety of artists and artisans whose higher skills commanded higher 

wages. The transformation of the ceramics industry traced in the 

first part of this paper epitomizes this larger phenomenon. More 

highly skilled and specialized artisans were working in this sector by 

the sixteenth century than two centuries earlier, at the time of Giotto 

and Dante; and these workers, being more numerous and more 

prosperous, themselves generate demand for consumer items, including, 

perhaps for the firstime in the history of Europe, some of 

those "extras" that lay beyond life's necessities and that we canjustly 

label as luxuries -like maiolica itself.41 

More money, and more people with money, are what we might 

call permissive causes for greater demand. Today, greater disposable 

income is a sufficient explanation for increased consumption. Our 

commodity-oriented economy is fueled by the consumer, who is 

assumed to have an insatiable appetite for objects, and by the advertisers, 

who have learned how to manipulate this demand. The very 

formula "supply and demand" we use to anlayze the market reflects 

this priority: it seems almost enough to introduce a new product into 

the marketplace for it to find clients on its own. Economic analysis, 

therefore, tends to take demand for granted. The logic of the market 

before "the consumer revolution" of the eighteenth century, however, 

was just the opposite: it was "demand and supply." In other 

words, maiolica did not come into existence as just another consumer 

product, the demand for which could be taken for granted 

4ISee the Conclusion to my The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social 

History (Baltimore, 1980). 



ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA I9 

once people had more money to spend. The greater wealth of the 

Renaissance, and the wide distribution of that wealth, may explain 

why people were able to buy what they did, but it does not explain 

why they wanted the things they bought, including maiolica. Economic 

analysis, in short, will revealpermissive causes but not effective 

causes. 

To find effective causes it is necessary to de-mystify demand by 

somehow getting into the world of the consumer's habits, values, 

and attitudes. Through a functional analysis of maiolica as tableware, 

we can take our first precarioustep into this nebulous world 

of human behavior by investigating changes in the dining habits of 

Italians in the Renaissance. A strong hint that dining habits indeed 

changed lies in the fact that demand for these moderately priced ceramics 

came also from the rich and powerful and not just generally 

from the more prosperous middling ranks of society. An early 

sixteenth-century writer from that most feudal of Italian kingdoms, 

Naples, comments -not, perhaps, without some indignation -on 

how the princes and barons, having recently lost the taste for eating 

off silver plates and drinking out of gold goblets, were now using 

tableware supplied not, as traditionally, by goldsmiths but by common 

clayworkers (cretari).42 A contemporary Venetian, Marin Sanudo, 

observed that the duke of Calabria's table was indeed laden 

with what he called "porcelain"-and, he adds, a very noble sight 

it was. 43 In I 5 I i, Alfonso d'Este bought Faentine ware for his table, 

and in I 526, the Gonzaga marquis of Mantua was reported to be interested 

in finding someone who knew how to make porcelain because 

he took a particular pleasure in eating off such wares. 44 At the 

end of the sixteenth century, a special six-year privilege granted in 

Milan to a Neapolitan for setting up a pottery made the point that 

maiolica was appreciated by everyone, but especially by princes and 

gentlemen for their dining rooms.45 

Why did the rich begin to use maiolica on their dinner tables? The 

matter had little to do with "conspicuous consumption" in the usual 

economic sense of that concept: compared to gold and silver plate- 

42Guido Donatone, "Maiolica napoletana dell'etA viceregnale," Faenza, 58 

(1972):87. 

43Guido Donatone, "La maiolica napoletana dalle origini al secolo XV," Storia di 

Napoli 4 (Naples, 1974) 604. 

44Campori, Maiolica di Ferrara i8, 56. 

45Donatone, "Contributo sulla maiolica napoletana del XVI secolo" 34. 




the traditional form of display at table -majolica was hardly a luxury 

object. The most expensive items I have turned up are two large 

(6i cm. high) and ornately shaped vases elaborately painted by the 

prominent artist Flaminio Fontana for Francesco de' Medici: each 

cost ten scudi, which at the time, I 573, was about what an unskilled 

laborer could hope to earn in three months.46 The large and elaborately 

decorated plates Piccolpasso lists in his catalogue (c. I 550) cost 

up to two scudi, no more than about three weeks' work at a minimum 

wage. Plates got considerably cheaper, however, as they got 

smaller. In one service bought by the Medici wife of Filippo Strozzi 

in I 5 I 7, a large plate cost one lira, but the entire service of 84 pieces 

cost only just over 36/2 lire or about five ducats (at that time, about 

three-to-four months' work of an unskilled laborer). 47 Obviously, 

in terms of labor costs, these were expensive items; but the equivalent 

amounts of gold and silver (the ducat containedjust over three 

grams of gold, worth about ten to eleven times as much in silver; the 

scudo was a money of account worth somewhat less than the ducat) 

could hardly have been made into anything as large and showy as 

this brightly colored pottery. Many Italians, however, were probably 

inclined to regard plate as dead capital, since in their advanced 

economy, bullion could be put to better use in investments to generate 

income. 48 The skill and taste that went into maiolica, it could 

also be argued, was rarer even than the bullion that laded the table 

of northern princes -and maiolica was a good deal less expensive. 

It may quite simply have been, too, as the French traveller Montaigne 

discovered on his trip to Italy, that what he called the clean, 

white earthenware of Italy, resembling porcelain, made food more 

appetizing than the pewterware he was accustomed to in France. In 

fact, according to the Bolognese scientist, Ulisse Aldovrandi, writing 

in i6i8, food did indeed taste better when served on ceramic 

wares rather than on silver;49 and a generation later, an author of a 

46Marco Spallanzani, "Maioliche di Urbino nelle collezioni di Cosimo I, del Cardinale 

Ferdinando e di Francesco I de' Medici," Faenza, 65 (1979):117, where the documents 

earlier published by Gaetano Ballardini, "Maiolicari faentini e urbinati a Firenze," 

Faenza, 10 (1922):147, are more accurately transcribed. 

47Marco Spallanzani, "Un 'fornimento' di maioliche di Montelupo per Clarice 

Strozzi de' Medici," Faenza, 70 (I984):38I-87. 

48For Venetians' impression of plate in England as conspicuous hoarding, see 

F. C. Lane and R. C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice; i, 

Coins and Moneys of Account (Baltimore, I985) 67. 

49Campori, Maiolica di Ferrara i8. 




tract on household management observed that "many gentlemen, 

princes and cardinals want their food served up on dishes of white 

maiolica, which is safer than tin, not picking up bad odors, and 

cleaner, just as one sees princes use crystal for drinking although 

they have cups, glasses and other dishes in gilded silver."50 

But obviously there was more to it than this, for it was not just 

that Italians changed the kind of tableware they used: they also 

needed a lot more ofit to get through a meal. Before the Renaissance, 

even on the tables of the rich and powerful, there would not have 

been a great variety of items, however extravaganthe materials 

they were made from. Plates were not assigned to individual diners 

but were used to hold the food to which everyone helped himself; 

at the most, the diner might have had his own small bowl, a knife, 

and perhaps a mug for drinking. The documents indicate that all this 

changed in the Renaissance. A description of a banquet in Ferrara in 

I565 mentioning I50 plates plus 50 bowls-"all of porcelain," according 

to the document -shows how, by the later Renaissance, tables 

had become more heavily laden with a much greater variety of 

dishes. 5'Moreover, Italians, in referring to such an array of tableware, 

began to use the words servizio and credenza in the modern 

sense of a decorative, as well as a functional, collectivity. 52 Already 

in I454 a Paduan, Isacco dei Dondi, ordered a service of dishes in 

white maiolica of 48 plates, two bowls, and four pitchers, each with 

the family coat-of-arms in gilt. 53 

Throughouthe sixteenth century, these services grew in size. We 

hear of one service of I 54 pieces brought to a Paduan convent by a 

nun from a Venetian family, 54 another of I8I pieces made for a noble 

family of Bologna,55 two of 20I pieces all together sent to a d'Este 

cardinal in Rome in I563,56 another of 257 belonging to the d'Este 

50Antonio Adami, II novitiato del Maestro di casa (Rome, I657) i65. 

51Ibid. 23. 

52Some interesting comments on this subject are made by Otto Mazzucato, "Sulla 

definizione del 'servizio da tavola' nella ceramica," and by Pietro Marsilli, "I servizi 

compendiari faentini," in AttiAlbisola, I5 (I982):19-35 (this volume is dedicated to "il 

servizio da tavola in ceramica"). 

53Carlo Malagola, Memiorie storiche sulle maioliche di Faenza (Bologna, I 880) 427-28. 

54Decio Soave and Giovanni Battista Siviero, "II grande servizio conventuale del 

Museo Civico di Padova e considerazioni sulla ceramica conventuale veneta," Atti Albisola, 

I5 (I982):II3-I6. 

55Grigioni, "Documenti" 144, from a I556 shop inventory. 

56Campori, Maiolica di Ferrara 57. 




dukes of Ferrara,57 another of 306 pieces with the arms of Ascoli 

Piceno ordered from Castelli in I 592 by the city fathers for official 

banquets, 8 another of 307 pieces purchased in i 568 in Faenza by the 

Medici, 59 another of 374 pieces purchased in I 589 also in Faenza by 

the Medici,60 another of 380 pieces of Venetian ware sent in I 545 to 

the viceroy of Naples,6' another of6io pieces made in Faenza for the 

Gonzaga of Novellara in I590,62 and two others of Faentine ware 

shipped in I 590 to the Duke of Bavaria in sixteen crates. 63 Seventeen 

pieces of a service traditionally thought to have been made for the 

Ridolfi in I5I5-20 still survive in the Correr Museum in Venice; 

twenty-two pieces remain extant from a service made for Isabella 

d'Este Gonzaga in the I 520S; some three dozen pieces of a Pucci service 

made about I 532 are scattered about the world in various collections; 

and no fewer than II2 pieces survive from one service made 

for the Duke ofBavaria. By the end of the sixteenth century, the pantry 

of the grand duke of Tuscany had over 4,000 ceramic items worthy 

of mention in inventories.64 

These services provided people not only with more dishes at table 

but also dishes in a much greater variety of forms. J. V. G. Mallet 

thinks that potters would not have produced so many shapes (some 

of which created problems for pictorial decoration) had they not 

been intended for use; and this proliferation of forms would therefore 

seem to have been linked to specialized functions.65 The documents, 

especially inventories, reveal the growth of an appropriate 

vocabulary to describe all these items.66 An inventory of the service 

sent to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in I 568 divides the 307 pieces into 

23 different categories of plates, bowls, pitchers, and vases; and ref- 

57Grigioni, "Documenti" 145, from a I556 shop inventory. 

"8Giuseppe Fabiani, Ascoli nel Cinqquecento (Ascoli Piceno, 1970) 2:275-76. 

59Ballardini, "Maiolicari a Firenze" I45. 

6oMarco Spallanzani, "Ceramiche nelle raccolte medicee da Cosimo I a Ferdinando 

I," in Le arti del Principato mediceo (Florence, I980) 94. 

6iSpallanzani, "Maioliche veneziane per Cosimo I de' Medici ed Eleanora di Toledo," 

Faenza, 67 (I98I):73. 

62Eros Biavati, "Leonardo Bettisi fu Antonio ed il figlio Antonio junior detti ambedue 

'don Pino,' " Faenza, 65 (1979):369. 


64Spallanzani, "Ceramiche nelle raccolte medicee." 

6,Mallet, "Gonzaga Patronage" I62-63. 

66For analysis of the growing vocabulary, see Genevieve and Henry Bresc, "Cucina 

e tavola a Palermo nel Tre e Quattrocento," Atti Albisola, 9 (1976):21-33 (for inventories), 

and Santa Nepoti Frescura, "Cucina e ceramica nei ricettari dei secoli XIV-XVII," 

ibid.: 129-47. 




erence has already been made to the I 556 shop inventory of over 

20,000 items divided into 6o categories. Unfortunately, the terminology 

of the period is highly imprecise with respect to form, size, 

and function; and there is virtually no visual evidence in Renaissance 

art (in contrast to earlier art) for the appearance of a fully laid table. 

Today anyone who wants to buy a set of dishes is prepared for the 

vast array of items that constitute the complete place setting - serving 

plates, dinner plates, luncheon plates, bread-and-butter plates, 

salad plates, dessert plates; coffee cups, demitasse cups, chocolate 

cups, tea cups, mugs, and so on. The Italians did not reach this degree 

of specialization, but it was in the Renaissance that the long and 

seemingly interminable process of proliferation of different kinds of 

dishes began. 

Why did Italians want more and more dishes, and new kinds of 

dishes, on their tables? In part, it may have been a response to the 

greater variety of foods they were eating. The decline in population 

in the fourteenth century, already referred to as an explanation for 

the increase in wages and per capita wealth, also had its effect on people's 

eating habits because the agricultural sector, once it did not 

have to concentrate on the basic staples to feed an excess population, 

could diversify its production. In fact, the phenomenon has been referred 

to as the first agricultural revolution. Quantity and variety of 

foods increased, meat, for example, became more widely consumed 

throughout the society than at any time before modern times. Moreover, 

the quality of the preparation of food improved, as cooking 

came in for more studied consideration by Italians. The increase of 

the number of recipe books from the late fifteenth century onwards, 

in fact, marks the beginning of the history of haute cuisine long before 

anything similar is found elsewhere in Europe. Montaigne ridiculed 

the pretentiousness with which an Italian chef he once met in 

France insisted on talking about food: 

He gave me a discourse on this science of supping with a grave and magisterial 

countenance, as if he were speaking of some grand point of theology. He unravelle 

differences in appetite for me: the appetite one has at the outset, and 

that which one has after the second and third courses; the means of sometimes 

appealing to it in simple ways, sometimes reawakening and stimulating it; the 

rules regarding sauces, first in general and then particularising the qualities of 

ingredients and their effects; the different salads according to their season, what 

must be served hot and what cold, and the ways of decorating and embellishing 

them to make them even more pleasing in appearance. After that, he embarked 

on the order of courses, full of important and fine considerations. . . . And all 




this bloated with grand and magnificent words, such as one might use in describing 

the government of an empire. 67 

The occasion for Montaigne's ridicule is his essay "On the Vanity 

of Words"; but there is no doubt that for the Italians this refinement 

of the palette through the culinary art became charged with social 

pretensions. In the famous treatise on gastronomy, De Honesta Voluptate, 

written in I475 (and to which were appended one of the first 

collections of what canjustly be called gourmet recipes), the humanist 

Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, raises the subject of cooking 

to the level of a kind of moral discourse by relating it to the rationality 

of behavior and to an individual's sense of elegance and 

good taste.68 The preparation of food, along with manners, thus entered 

into the game of competition for status in a society increasingly 

conscious of hierarchy. This gave rise to whatJack Goody has called 

a "sumptuary cusine" or "hierarchical cooking," whereas in the 

Middle Ages the class difference in diet was more a matter of quantity 

than quality.69 

Likewise, the spectacle with which food was presented at table 

and table manners became codified in the elaboration of dining etiquette. 

The Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano included the 

quality of dining in his discussion of social virtue, since it is one of 

the most important activities people do together. He called this virtue 

"conviviality," and in defining it he went beyond the traditional 

medieval notion of expansive hospitality and extravagant feasting to 

emphasize the civility of being in the company of others at table.70 

Among other things, this new table etiquette required more utensils. 

The diner no longer ate with fingers, assisted at the most by a 

knife. Inventories of merchants -and not just the wealthy ones -in 

fifteenth-century Florence show that table settings of the full complement 

of knives, forks, and spoons made in silver and monogrammed 

with the family coat-of-arms were common household 

67Cited in Stephen Mennell, All Manners ofFood: Eating and Taste in England and France 

from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, i985) 70-71. 

68Gherardo Ortalli, "Cibi e cultura nel Medio Evo europeo," in A. Pertusi, G. Ortalli, 

and I. Paccagnella, eds., Civilta delta tavola dal niedioevo al Rinasciniento (Vicenza, 

i983) 32-33. 

69This last proposition is the thesis of Mennel, All Manners of Food, which, however, 

does not deal with the Italian background of developments in France and England. Likewise, 

only English evidence is cited byjack Goody, Cooking, Cusine, and Class: A Study 

in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, i982), esp. 133-53. 

7'Giovanni Pontano, I trattati delle virtei sociali, ed. Francesco Tateo (Rome, i965). 




possessions; and they were one of the prestige items a citizen was 

likely to take with him (even ifhe had to borrow them) when he travelled 

into the countryside to serve out a term of office as a local governor. 

Moreover, diners now ate off their own plates rather than 

feeding themselves from a common plate shared with others, and 

plates were changed in the course of a meal. Italians sought to impose 

rules on the entire organization of a meal, including the order 

of courses and the setting of the table; and tracts on the subject appear 

and reappear from the later sixteenth century onwards, particularly 

in Rome and Venice. 7 So, too, the napkin came into its own, the 

indispensable item in each diner's place setting as the essential utensil 

in the liturgy of table ritual; and as the symbol of everything that this 

new social ritual came to stand for, it was glorified into a veritable 

spectacle by being shaped into all kinds of elaborate forms.72 

Vespasiano da Bisticci's description of the elegant merchanthumanist 

Niccolo Niccoli at table reflectsomething of the social 

snobbery that Italians were already in the early fifteenth century beginning 

to attach to dining habits and to the setting of the dinner table 

itself: "Of all men ever born he was by far the cleanest, in his eating 

habits as in all else. When he was at table he ate from the most 

beautiful antique dishes, and he drank from cups of crystal or some 

other fine stone. To see him at table, as old as he was, gave one a sense 

of refinement. He always insisted that the table cloth before him be 

of the whitest, like all his other linens. Some may be astonished to 

hear that he possessed such a vast quantity of tableware, and to these 

may be answered that in his day things of this sort were not so much 

in vogue or so highly prized as they have been since. . ." (and the 

author here is writing only one generation after Niccoli's death in 

I437). 

71 Christoforo Messisbugo, Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generate 

(Ferrara, I 549); Eustachio Celebrino, Opera nuova che insegnapparechiare una mensa . 

(n.p., n.d., but later sixteenth century); Vittorio Lancellotti, Lo scalco prattico (Rome, 

i627); Antonio Adami, II novitiate del Maestro di casa (Rome, i657); Francesco Liberati, 

II peifetto Maestro di casa (Rome, i658). 

72Elvira Garbero Zorzi, "Cerimoniale e spettacolaritA: ii tovagliolo sulla tavola del 

principe," in Sergio Bertelli and Giuliano Crif6, eds., Rituale, cerinioniale, etichetta (Milan, 

i985) 67-83. This volume explores various aspects of food, table settings, and table 

manners in Renaissance Italy. These studies take as their point of departure the work of 

Norbert Elias (who did not deal with Italy) and try to push his argument into the realms 

of anthropology to uncover deeper social meanings. Zorzi's article, however, is the only 

one firmly anchored in materials of the epoch. 




The backwardness of northern Europe in the matter of table manners 

stood as a sharp backdrop for Italian civility. Machiavelli observed 

that Italian princes ate and even slept with greater 

"splendor," and the humanist Pontano criticized the French at table 

because they ate to satisfy their gluttony without any sense of splendor. 

When the poet Tasso went north to France he was surprised at 

the absence of drinkinglasses at table. He noted that the French certainly 

knew about glass, for they made beautiful church windows 

out of it for the glory of God; but he found it curious that they did 

not use it also to make table utensils "for display and for the pleasure 

of drinkers. "73 For their part, northern European travellers in Italy, 

when they sat down to dinner, must have been impressed by the array 

of dishes, glasses, silverware, and napkins they found before 

them. The French aristocrat and intellectual Montaigne deemed it 

worthy of commenthat in Italy all diners at table had their own napkins 

and complete service of silverware, so that they did not even 

touch their plates with their hands while eating. Just a few years 

later, the English tourist Fynes Moryson also observed that Italians 

"touch no meate with the hand, but with a forke of silver or other 

mattall, each man being served with his forke and spoone, and glasse 

to drinke. "74 One can imagine the perplexity, if not the embarrassment 

and even intimidation, felt by these northern Europeans on being 

confronted with all this Italian splendor at table, fearful about 

how to proceed to eat without revealing their barbaric ways. After 

all, accustomed as they were to eating without forks, these northerners 

must have been somewhat used to biting their fingers occasionally 

when eating in haste-the aristocrat Montaigne admitted as 

much-and they might have agreed with the German preacher who 

found forks positively suspicious as a "diabolic luxury."75 

Northern Europeans, in any case, were tardy in taking up the 

habit of using high-quality ceramics at table. Italian maiolica was exported 

to those parts in the later Middle Ages, most of it, however, 

not of the finest quality; and local pottery production was not influenced 

by it. Northern Europeans began their own production of 

tin-glazed pottery only well into the sixteenth century under the 

dominant influence of immigrant Italian artisans. France led the 

73 Le lettere di Torquanto Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, i854)1:42. 

74Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary, 4 vols. (Glasgow, 1907-08) 4:98. 

75Cited by Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries I (London, 

I98I) 205-o6. 




way, but much of its early production consisted of pharmacy jars 

and tiles. We have already cited Montaigne's impression, in the second 

half of the sixteenth century, of the clean, white earthenware he 

found in Italy; and Moryson also commented on "the white glistering 

and painted dishes of earth (whereof the finest are much esteemed 

with us). "76 Inventories indicate that in England as late as the 

end of the seventeenth century only a very small percentage of gentry 

and townsmen possessed "china," not to mention the rarity also 

of knives and forks. 77 

The functional analysis of majolica has taken us much beyond the 

discussion of its primary use as tableware. In considering the immediate 

context for maiolica in its own time as the art of dining cultivated 

by Italians in the Renaissance with all its social overtones, we 

have, in fact, begun to enter the anthropologist's world, where consumption 

is regarded as a language for social messages, and commodities 

as signs with rhetorical uses. 78Following this route, we can 

extend the cultural context in which maiolica came into its own as 

a minor art form much beyond the dining room. This wider context 

comprehends many realms of the human spiri that manifesthemselves 

in material objects, including aesthetics and the very sense of 

possessiveness itself. 

Unfortunately, the contemporary evidence for maiolica seldom 

gives much of a hint of why in fact people liked it. What can we say 

of the duke of Ferrara's appreciation of maiolica on the basis of his 

commissioning of no one less than Titian to take care of the arrangements 

to have some made in Venice, when we do not have the slightest 

idea of what he wanted?79 What was it that Isabella d'Este, 

Marchesa ofMantua, liked so much about the broken piece ofmaiolica 

she sent to Ferrara to get repaired?80 Pope Sixtus IV and Lorenzo 

il Magnifico expressed thanks for gifts of maiolica vases by saying 

76Moryson, Itinerary 99. 

77Lorna Weatherill, "Consumer Behaviour and Social Status in England, i66o- 

1750," Continuity and Change, i (I986):191-2i6; Hugh Thomas, A Histoy of the World 

(New York, 1979) 238. 

78See Arjun Appadurai's Introduction to the volume of conference papers edited by 

him, The Social Life of Things: Coininodities 

Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, England, 

I986). esp. 29-4I. 

79Campori, Maiolica di Ferrara i5-06. 

8o Ibid. 13. 




they valued them more than if they had been made of gold or silver, 

but was this anything more thanjus the polite thing to say under the 

circumstances?' 

The very few direct statements by anyone at the time about why 

he or she liked majolica point to certain technical qualities, above all 

its fragility and the purity of the glaze. The Neapolitan poet Sannazzaro; 

confessing his weakness for such things, found them more 

"delicate" than work in gold and silver. 82 An agent of Isabella d'Este 

informed her that the half-dozen-or-so items being made for her 

would be "piui galante, piiu subtile, et piut legiere, tutti bianchi lavorati 

di biancho sopra biancho. "83 The I 594 Milanese grant of privileges 

to pottersingled out the jewel-like, transparent colors of the 

glaze and the relative weightlessness of the objects as the particular 

qualities that made them popular in the luxury market. 

The very names Italians gave to much of their pottery- "whiteware" 

and "porcelain"-reveal one quality they liked about maiolica. 

We know how much they admired the rare porcelain objects 

that reached the West from China. 84 Porcelain inspired imitation in 

the blue-and-white decoration on some of the earliest products of 

various centers; and already by I470 evidence from Venice points to 

the first efforts in Italy to make the real thing. In the sixteenth century, 

the desire to discover the secret of making porcelain possessed 

a number of princes, including the dukes of Savoy, Mantua, Ferrara, 

Urbino, and Tuscany; and some of these princesubsidized potteries 

to sponsor research and experimentation under a cloak of great secrecy. 

Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, built a kiln inside the walls 

of his castle and directed its activities, it being reputed that he executed 

pieces with his own hands.85 His youngest son, Sigismondo, 

also pursued this interest; and later Alfonso II succeeded in producing 

a white-ware that was much praised by Piccolpasso (none of 

which seems to have survived). It was, of course, Grand Duke 

Francesc of Tuscany who finally succeeded in making a kind of artificial 

or "soft-paste" porcelain, the so-called Medici porcelain, a 

success that probably owed much to the maiolica technique of add- 

8iGiuseppe Papagni, La maiolica del Rinascimnento 

Casteldurante, Urbino e Pesaro 

(n.p., n.d.) io6. 

82Donatone, "Majolica napoletana" 605. 


84Spallanzani, Ceracmiche orientali. 

8"Biscontini Ugolini, "Nuovo pezzo," 158-59. 




ing tin oxide to the glaze. Such experiments were conducted in connection 

with the alchemical interests of many of these princes, and 

it is possible that the potter's art, turning earth into porcelain, held 

for them the fascination of a kind of paradigmatic magic. 86 Some 

may also have accepted the popular notion that porcelain tableware 

was sensitive to poison in foods. In any case, all shared the prospect 

of creating valuable products for the market. With these multiple interests 

in ceramics, Renaissance princes hardly considered the technical 

knowledge of such a craft beneath their dignity; indeed, it could 

even give them a certain fame. Piccolpasso, himself a gentleman 

with such interests, singles out Alfonso d'Este, Cosimo I, Emanuele 

Filiberto, and Francesco Maria II della Rovere for special praise in 

this respect; and he wrote his treatise not for artisans ("persons of 

small consideration") but for men of "lofty spirits and speculative 

minds" who were becoming interested in the subject. 87 

Nor is it difficulto understand the appeal of maiolica in the 

istoriato style, with its complex illustrations from history, mythology, 

and literature, since these pieces were charged with meaning by 

the humanist culture of the day. 88 It was probably a piece of this kind 

that Isabella d'Este wanted repaired. The papal governor Monsignor 

Guidiccioni, who in i640 received a gift of two illustrated 

plates accompanied by a letter of no fewer than sixteen pages in 

which all the iconographical complexities of the illustrations are explained, 

must have had an appreciation for this istoriato pottery that 

had little to do with what it was actually made of. 89 Perhaps Italians, 

with their passionate admiration for classical culture, regarded these 

particular kinds of illustrated pieces as evidence somehow not just of 

a revival in their own times of the ancient art of pottery, but of the 

ability of moderns, at least in the opinion of Vasari, to go beyond 

even the ancients in this art form: "As far as we know, the Romans 

were not aware of this type of painting on pottery. The vessels from 

86For some ideas on this subject, see the Introduction to Giovanni Conti's ed. of Piccolpasso, 

Li tre libri dell'arte del vasaio (Florence, 1976). 

87The efforts at Ferrara to make porcelain are described by Campori, AMaiolica di Ferrara. 

For Medici porcelain, see Giuseppe Liverani, Catalogo delle porcellane dei Medici 

(Faenza, 1936). The enormous collection of Chinese porcelain belonging to the Medici 

grand dukes is described by Spallanzani, "Ceramiche nelle raccolte medicee.'" 

88There is hardly any direct evidence, however, for the contemporary appreciation 

of this aspect of maiolica; see Augusto Campana, "Poesie umanistiche relative a ceramiche," 

Faeniza, 32 (1946):59-68. 

89Carlo Piancastelli, "Notizie di due piatti faentini del 1540, " Faenza, 8 (1920):49-58. 




those days that have been found filled with the ashes of their dead are 

covered with figures incised and washed in with one colour in any 

given area, sometimes in black, red, or white, but never with the 

brilliance of glaze nor the charm and variety of painting which has 

been seen in our day."9o 

In the final analysis, however, there is no accounting for taste; 

and, in any case, the subject of taste is best left to the art historians. 

But it is another matter when taste, whatever that taste may be, is 

extended to new kinds of objects like maiolica that heretofore had 

hardly had the qualities of a minor art form. What is taste, after all, 

but just one way of rationalizing man's attachmento material objects? 

And with this observation we arrive at that point in our search 

for the larger cultural context in which to see maiolica, where we 

push beyond functions and beyond taste to enter into that realm in 

the human psyche dominated by the spirit of possessiveness with 

which men attach themselves to things. 

It was this realm, where possessions become an end in themselves, 

that people entered for the firstime in the Renaissance-a 

step that was to have enormous implications for the subsequent history 

of the West. The Renaissance, after all, marks much more than 

just a change in style: it represents nothing less than an imperial expansion 

of taste throughouthe material world to appropriate such 

things as the town house, the rural villa, the garden, and pottery, all 

of which were thereby elevated to the status of art for the firstime. 

Even more importantly, this empire of taste pushed well beyond the 

confines of traditional material culture to generate demand for all 

kinds of new objects that simply had not existed earlier, from secular 

pictures complete with picture frames on the walls inside the home, 

to forks and painted dishes on the dining room table. 

The recourse to taste was how the Italians rationalized the sense 

of possessiveness that seized them in the Renaissance. We choose 

some things, says Matteo Palmieri, an early fifteenth-century Florentine, 

for comfort and dignity, for the sheer sense of beauty with 

which they enhance our lives, and these include one's house, its furnishings, 

and all those appurtenances for living in (what he calls) private 

splendor.9' This ethical and aesthetic rationalization of sheer 

materialism was taken up for more systematiconsideration by the 

90Quoted in Wilson, Ceramic Art IO. 

91Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile, ed. Felice Battaglia (Bologna, 1944) 154, i64. 



ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 3I 

fifteenth-century Neapolitan Giovanni Pontano in a treatise on the 

five social virtues connected with the spending of money for one's 

own private enjoyment. The very idea of writing on the virtues of 

spending money was generated in a market economy where people 

were becoming more than a little heady about the exhilarating pleasures 

of possessing things. One of Pontano's virtues, conviviality, 

has already been mentioned; another is splendor. Splendor consists 

in furnishings, utensils for everyday use, ornaments, and personal 

adornment. Pontano emphasizes the moral quality of possessiveness 

itself, tempered of course by moderation and appropriateness. 

The beauty of all these things, he argues, excites admiration for the 

possessor of objects; moreover, this beauty consists not in utility and 

inherent value of materials but in rarity, variety, and craftsmanship, 

and in the pleasure they give the owner. In short, Pontano defines 

possessiveness as an ethical principle and then translates the ethical 

principle as an end in itself into a principle of beauty, thus endowing 

possessiveness with an aesthetic as well as an ethical quality.92 

A new dynamic thus came into play in the Renaissance luxury 

marke that engendered a proliferation of objects and an increase of 

their variety-indeed, that redefined the very concept of luxury. 

This new situation in the marketplace opened up incomparable opportunities 

for artisans-from painters, sculptors, and architects, to 

modest potters' inducing them to take the initiative with new ideas 

to shape taste and so arouse demand yet further, thereby, to an extent, 

getting a certain control over demand. This is the dynamic behind 

the growth of the maiolica industry traced in the early part of 

this article. In a sense, the material culture of Renaissance Italy generated 

the very first stirring of the consumerism that was to reach a 

veritable revolutionary stage in the eighteenth century and eventually 

to culminate in the extravaganthrow-away, fashion-ridden, 

commodity-culture of our own times. 

In Renaissance Italy, however, these first stirs of consumerism 

hardly anticipated the kind of absurd and wasteful emulation that 

Thorsten Veblen encapsulated in his concept of "conspicuous consumption" 

to explain this kind of behavior in the modern luxury 

market. These Renaissance habits of spending cannot be explained 

away as simply the conspicuous expression of wealth, for many of 

these objects-like maiolica and even paintings-were in fact rela- 

92Francesco Tateo, Umnanesimno etico di Giovanni Pontano (Lecce, 1972) 171-77. 




tively inexpensive, and certainly their value seldom consists in the 

inherent rarity of materials. These objects incorporated values other 

than sheer wealth: for majolica, they ranged from standards of personal 

comportment at table to alchemical and literary erudition. 

These were social values through which individual sought to say 

something about themselves and to communicate that to others, 

thereby establishing their credentials as a new kind of elite, one of 

wealth, to be sure, but also one of taste and refinement. The more 

intimate relation with those objects, finally, sharpened one's appreciation 

of them for their craftsmanship apart from the inherent value 

of materials. As David Hume observed, referring to the course of 

civilization in England in a later period when the consumer revolution 

was finally underway, this kind of luxury heightens the gratification 

of the senses and hence leads to refinement 

taste and in the 

arts generally. In the final analysis, such a dynamic in the luxury 

market is what the Renaissance in a material sense was all about: to 

whatever exten the period was or was not one of"rebirth, " the new 

demand signaled a sharp break with past consumer behavior and 

heralded the advent of one of the most characteristic features of 

modern economic life. 

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

BEST goldthwaite The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica 1989

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