It's been nice to take a brief holiday from putting drywall up in our house (woot!) today. It's just like old times, listening to records working on my classes and reading the Sunday Times. While I was flipping through the (ridiculously huge) "New Season" section on art and music, an ad for a new show at the Frick Collection in New York caught my eye. The image above is of a large Italian Maiolica platter circa 1565 by the Fontana workshop.
I'm currently looking under all of our couch cushions to scrape for money to get to New York to see the show, but I haven't found much, since we just moved and shook all of our furniture out. I'm a slavish Maiolica fan--first, because the techniques are so hard to master, and secondly because the stuff is so incredibly weird and beautiful.
Maiolica is hard to master. It evolved in Turkey as a way to emulate Chinese porcelain, and quickly spread to Europe, finding a home in Italy as maiolica, and in Holland as Delftware. The technique involves coating a normal terra cotta plate with a white glaze, then painting directly onto the white glaze with colorants before the whole thing is fired. Various cultures, including the Italians learned to use special metalic salts and firing techniques to make decadent lusters as well. The trickiest aspect is that there are no do-overs. The unfired glaze absorbs the colorants and shows each brushstroke...making the technique closer to fresco painting than oil painting. Combine the laborious technique with the uncertainty of the kiln, and you'll have a new appreciation for this style of pottery the next time you see some of it at a museum.
The Frick show, called "Exuberant Grotesques" focuses on a genre of Italian ceramics called "Istoriato". These pieces of pottery, which are mostly from the 16th century, are great examples of the use of narrative...showing biblical, historical and mythological stories in the compact form of plates. Istorio artists loved to crib from Renaissance painters like Raphael, making these decorative plates an early ancestor of today's Thomas Kincade and Norman Rockwell collector plates.
Istoriato plates are way more than that, of course. The workshops in and around Florence that churned them out were smart about their combination of patterns and figures. Many museums display the platters on mirrors and easels so that the backs, which were often decorated as elaborately as the front, could be seen. The scenes on the front of the plates were usually heavy on bombast--scenes of biblical or mythological debauchery were a great excuse for the inclusion of plenty of nudes. Also, grotesque monsters and dragons were often used to add even more interest.
The Exuberant Grotesques show will be at the Frick from September 15 through January 17th. I don't think I'll be able to make it, so I'll be expecting a review if you can make it.
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