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

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ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 17 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. This content downloaded from 195.34.78.191 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 19:42:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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). This content downloaded from 195.34.78.191 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 19:42:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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BEST goldthwaite The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica 1989

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