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

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 27
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.
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