Medici porcelain

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Medici porcelain was the first successful attempt in Europe to imitate Chinese porcelain. The experimental manufactory housed in the Casino of San Marco in Florence existed between 1575^[1] and 1587^[2] under the patronage of Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. A painted mark of Brunelleschi's dome and F appears under some pieces; others bear the Medici palle, the balls that are the Medici heraldic charge. Never a commercial venture, Medici porcelains were sometimes given as diplomatic gifts: surviving pieces bear the arms of Philip II of Spain.

It was a type of soft-paste porcelain, composed of white clay containing powdered feldspar, calcium phosphate and wollastonite (CaSiO3), with quartz; calcium phosphate in the glaze indicates that the Islamic technique of using calcined bone to make an opaque white glaze was adopted.^[3]The result is translucent but slightly glassy in feel.

Decorations were painted in underglaze blue which fired blue to gray in the kiln. Some pieces have outlines traced in manganese.^[4] Body shapes are adapted from maiolica shapes and silver models; they range from the largest basins and ewers, chargers and plates, to the smallest cruets. Decors are executed in underglaze blue in imitation of Chinese blue-and-white wares, or of Turkish "İznik" ceramics, or rarely in imitation of maiolica grottesche decors; examples of both Chinese and Turkish ceramics were represented in the Medici collections, the Sultan of Egypt having sent Lorenzo de' Medici "large vessels of porcelain, the like of which has never been seen" in 1478 (National Gallery website).

When Ferdinando Cardinal Medici inherited as Grand Duke, he brought to Florence his Chinese and Medici porcelains from Villa Medici in Rome, along with his paintings and treasured Roman antiquities; but with the ubiquity of European soft-paste and true porcelains in the eighteenth century, the Medici heirs in the House of Lorraine came to value less and less the imperfect Medici porcelains, with their minute firing cracks and bubbled glazes. In 1772 an auction in the Palazzo Vecchio of objects from storage dispersed the Medici porcelains conserved in Tuscany; the 1588 inventory drawn up after Francesco's death had listed 310 pieces.^[5] The venture disappeared from history until interest revived after the mid-nineteenth century. Some sixty or seventy pieces are known to survive.

[edit] Notes

^ The first successes were reported in 1575 by the Venetian ambassador Andrea Gussoni, who mantioned in his brief to the Serenissima four qualities that made porcelain desirable, apart from its exotic rarity: "its transparency, hardness, lightness and delicacy, it has taken him ten years to discover the secret, but a Levantine showed him the way to success." (quoted by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2002, cat. nos 101-05, pp 247ff. Giorgio Vasari reported in the 1568 edition of his Vite that Bernardo Buontalenti was currently at work on discovering the art of porcelain, but there is no sign that he was successful.
^ There are no references to Medici porcelain manufacture securely dated after Francesco's death in 1587.
^ According to on-site Raman spectroscopic analyses performed at the Musée National de Céramique, Sèvres, reported in Ph. Colomban, V. Milande, H. Lucas, "On-site Raman analysis of Medici porcelain", Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, 35.1 (2003:68-72).
^ A single piece decorated in green and yellow is at Brunswick and another in a private collection.
^ Marco Spallanzani, "Medici Porcelain in the Collection of the Last Grand-Duke" The Burlington Magazine 132 No. 1046 (May 1990, pp. 316-320) p. 317

[edit] External links

[edit] References

G. Cora and A. Fanfani, La porcellana dei Medici (Milan) 1986.
Giuseppe Liverani, Catalogo delle porcellane dei Medici, in series Piccola Biblioteca del Museo delle Ceramiche in Faenza: II (Faenza) 1936.
Arthur Lane, Italian Porcelain London 1954.