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

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 15
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
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