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

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 9
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.
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