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

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.
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