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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Ethnographical / 16th C. Italian Maiolica Tile Fragment | Black / White Manganese Fish-Scale
Western Europe, Italy, maiolica tradition. A wedge of tin-glazed earthenware carrying a crisp black-and-white scheme: overlapping fish-scale imbrication, a sweeping arc, and a checkerboard band divided from the field by narrow rules. The calcareous body, pale buff at the broken edges, wears an opaque white tin-lead glaze, the ground on which Italian maiolica painters worked. A single manganese pigment does all the labor, reading dense black where it pools and a warm violet-brown where the brush ran thin, a hallmark of the tradition. The imbricated fill and checkered border are lifted from Roman black-and-white floor mosaic, a vocabulary Italian tile makers (Naples especially) revived with enthusiasm. Originally one unit in a tightly repeating pavement or wall scheme, the fragment preserves enough of the pattern's logic to reconstruct its rhythm. Maiolica is defined by its glaze rather than its clay: a lead silicate opacified with tin oxide, brushed over a low-fired calcareous earthenware and painted in metallic-oxide pigments before a second firing. The white surface behaves like a fresco intonaco, unforgiving of hesitation, since the porous raw glaze absorbs the brushstroke instantly and admits no correction. That technical signature is diagnostic here, separating the piece from Persian and Near Eastern stonepaste tiles, from Byzantine white-bodied wares, and from Roman lead-glazed and unglazed ceramics, none of which employ tin opacification. The pattern belongs to a long classicizing current in Italian architectural ceramics. Excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome put black-and-white tessellated floors back into circulation as design sources, and workshops in Naples, Vietri, and the Campanian coast translated imbricated scale fields, meanders, and checker borders from mosaic tesserae into painted squares, trading assembled stone for a single fired plane. Item # 205120
Estimate:£150.79
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographical
Estimate:
£150.79
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