Painting on a plate: Italian Renaissance maiolica

The years between 1470 and 1530 witness the most spectacular period of development in the history of Italian maiolica (tin-glazed earthenware). Potters produced wares of artistic sophistication and variety never seen before.

From 1500 a new style of pottery-painting, called istoriato, literally story painting, originated in various centres in Italy. The best maiolica painters began to use the whole surface of plates and vessels as canvases, mastering perspective drawing and extending the possibilities of their limited palette of colours to the full.

Finely painted wares achieved a high status amongst some of the grandest Renaissance patrons who commissioned large istoriato table services to use and display in their homes.

Maiolica painters were inspired by a wide variety of graphic sources. These included woodcuts by Italian and German masters and engravings of designs by Raphael and his circle. Potters would sometimes use more than one print for their compositions and combine figures taken from different sources. The most popular subjects represented on istoriato maiolica were from Greek and Roman mythology. This dish above, made in Faenza (one of the most important pottery centres), shows a popular story from Ovid's Metamorphoses: how Perseus rescued Andromeda from a sea moster.

As fine art artists, the best maiolica painters would sign or initial their work. Reproduced here is the only known work signed by the talented painter Jacopo, active in Cafaggiolo, near Florence in the first decades of the 16th century. The dish represents Judith with the head of Holofernes, whom she has be-haeded.

One of the most famous and prolific maiolica painters, Francesco Xanto Avelli (active in Urbino from the mid 1520s to ca 1542) was also a poet and started the trend of writing on the reverse of dishes the subject matter represented on the front.

The plate shown here (right), bearing the coat of arms of the Duke Federico Gonzaga and his wife Margherita Paleologo, has a verse on the back derived from the poet Petrarch. Although istoriato maiolica gradually became out of fashion in Italy by the end of the sixteenth century, it had by then been introduced into France.

The V&A is one of the greatest collection of Italian maiolica in the world; the museum holds more than one thousand of these rare and precious objects.