Renaissance ceramics - Current and Coming - exhibit Gods, Saints and Heroes: Ceramic Masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

During the Renaissance vibrant pigments were not only used to color prints in northern Europe. In Italy they were used to decorate ceramics. Many of these pigments were newly discovered and added greatly to the earlier palette. In Italian wares this is perhaps best borne out on large ceramic dishes and plates known as istoriato, or storytelling wares. Unlike colored prints, these are impervious to the effects of light, and therefore are as brilliant today as they were when they were created nearly five hundred years ago. These rare survivals confirm the fact that saturated colors were popular during this period and that ceramics were used as a vehicle to emulate the work of artists such as Raphael. These dishes, probably created more for display than actual use, were not only colorful adornments for the houses of affluent merchants and nobles, but also are important for the biblical or mythological narratives depicted on them. The scenes affirmed their owners' intellectual sophistication and knowledge of both the classical past and the Bible.

An exhibition that includes fifty-five istoriato wares is on view at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto until January 12, 2003. The show is entitled Gods, Saints and Heroes: Ceramic Masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, and includes printed books and incunabula, primarily ancient texts that were rediscovered and reprinted during the Renaissance; a fifteenth-century Bible; and photographs of engravings that were used as sources by the painters of istoriato wares. A particularly fascinating survival is Cipriano Piccolpasso's treatise Li tre libri dell'arte del vasaio... (The three books of the potter's art), written between 1556 and 1559, which contains illustrations that pertain to the ceramic arts.

There is no catalogue of this exhibition, of which the curators are Meredith Chilton of the Gardiner Museum and Kenneth Bartlett, a professor of history and Renaissance studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. The corporate sponsor of the exhibition is IntesaBci Canada.