This is the first catalogue of the collection of Early Modern ceramics in The Courtauld Gallery. The pieces in The Courtauld’s collection showcase brilliantly the skill of potters and pottery painters working at the time of Raphael and Titian.
 
Maiolica is one of the most revealing expressions of Renaissance art. Its extraordinary range of colours retain the vividness that they had when they left the potter’s kiln. Italian potters absorbed techniques and shapes from the Islamic world and incorporated ornament and subject matter from the arts of ancient Rome. This new approach to pottery making, combined with the invention of printing, woodcut and engraving, resulted in an extraordinary type of painted pottery, praised by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists for ‘surpassing the ancients with its brilliance of glaze and variety of painting’.
 
The collection boasts a magnificent group of vessels made during the high Renaissance, the golden age of Italian maiolica, and includes precious and delicate Deruta lustreware with imagery deriving from Perugino and Raphael, as well as vessels painted in a narrative style of pottery painting known as istoriato.
 
All major Renaissance pottery centres are represented in the collection, including Siena, Faenza and Venice, as well as splendid examples of the mysterious pharmacy jars made at the foot of the mountain of Gran Sasso in the town of Castelli d’Abruzzo. There are also handsome examples of Spanish lustreware, lead-glaze from France and Ottoman pottery. The detailed catalogue entries reveal affinities and influences between different pottery traditions and uncover a wealth of new information on the provenance of the pieces.
 
The volume includes an introductory essay on Italian Renaissance maiolica by the leading scholar on the subject, John Mallet, as well as an essay by Elisa Sani and Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Courtauld Gallery, on the Victorian collector Thomas Gambier Parry, which sheds new light on the development of this fascinating collection, connecting Gambier Parry’s artistic practice to his collecting and revealing new insights into his taste as a connoisseur.