Potter

POTTERY AND PORCELAIN T

HE word ‘ pottery” (Fr. poterne') in its widest sense includes all objects made of clay, moulded into form while in a moist plastic state, and then hardened by fire. Clay, the most widely spread and abundant of all mineral substances, consists essentially of a hydrated silicate of alumina (see vol. x. p. 237), admixed, however, in almost all cases with various impurities. Thus it usually contains a considerable proportion of free silica, lime, and oxides of iron, its colour chiefly depending on the last ingredient. The white kaolin clays (see Kaolin) used in the manufacture of porcelain are the purest; they consist of silicate of alumina, with 5 to 7 per cent, of potash, and only traces of lime, iron, and magnesia.

The making of pottery depends on the chemical change that takes place when clay is heated in the fire; the hydrated silicate of alumina becomes anhydrous, and, though the baked vessel can absorb mechanically a large quantity of water, the chemical state, and with it the hardness of the vessel, remains unaltered. A well-baked piece of clay is the most durable of all manufactured substances. In preparing clay for the potter it is above all things necessary that it should be worked and beaten, with sufficient water to make it plastic, into a perfectly homogeneous mass. Any inequalities cause an irregular expansion during the firing, and the pot cracks or flies to pieces. In early times the clay was prepared by being kneaded by the hands or trampled by the feet (see Isa. xli. 25); modern manufacturers prepare it on a larger scale by grinding it between mill-stones, and mixing it in a fluid state with an additional quantity of silica, lime, and other substances.

During the process of firing all clays shrink in volume, partly through the loss of water and partly on account of increase of density. What are called “fat” clays—those, that is to say, which are very plastic and unctuous—shrink very much, losing from one-third to one-fourth of their bulk; they are also very liable to crack or twist during the firing. “Lean” clays—those that have a large percentage of free silica—shrink but little, and keep their form unaltered under the heat of the kiln; they are not, however, so easy to mould into the required shape, and thus a certain compromise is frequently required. Lean and fat clays are mixed together, or silica (sand or ground and calcined flints) is added to a fat clay in sufficient quantity to enable it to stand the firing. The same result may be attained by the addition of broken pots, crushed or ground, an expedient practised during the earliest stages of the development of the art of pottery.

Classification.— Many attempts have been made to classify pottery and porcelain according to their mode of manufacture. The classification of Μ. Brongniart {Traité des Arts Céramiques, Paris, 1854) has been followed by most later writers. With some modifications it is as follows :— [table]

This classification is necessarily imperfect, some pottery coming under two heads, as, for instance, much of the Italian majolica, which is both enamelled and glazed. For this reason in the following article pottery will be treated according to its age and country, not according to its method of manufacture. Porcelain differs from pottery in being whiter, harder, less fusible, and (most essential difference) in being slightly translucent. The paste of which it is formed is a purer silicate of alumina than the clay of which pottery is made. It will therefore be described under separate heads (p. 633 sq., infra').

For the sake of clearness it will be well to define the sense in which technical words relating to pottery are used in this article. Body or paste is the clay of which the main bulk of a pot is made. Slip is clay finely ground and mixed with water to the consistency of cream. It is usually applied over the whole surface of a vessel in order to give it a finer face or a different colour from that of the body of the pot. It is also sometimes applied partially, forming ornaments in relief, as in the case of some Roman ware and the coarse 17th-century pottery of Staffordshire described below. Glaze is a thin coating of glass, evenly fused over the surface of a clay vessel to make it harder, and also to render it impervious to water. Clay simply baked without a vitreous coating is called biscuit·, its surface is dull, and it is more or less porous. The simplest and oldest form of glaze is a pure silicate of soda; the addition of oxide of lead makes the glaze more fusible, but less hard and durable. F or decorative purposes glazes may be coloured by various metallic oxides without losing their transparency. Enamel is a glaze with the addition of some substance to render it opaque. Binoxide of tin has the peculiar property that when even a small quantity is added to a transparent glass it renders it opaque and white without otherwise altering its character. Great confusion has been caused in various works on pottery by a careless use of the terms “glaze’’and “enamel”; they are both of the nature of glass, but the best distinction to make is to apply the word “enamel” to a vitreous coating that is opaque, and the word “glaze” to one that is transparent ; both may be coloured. The method of applying vitreous coatings to clay, whether enamel or glaze, is this. The materials are ground fine and mixed with water to the consistency of cream. The pot is dipped in the mixture, or the fluid is applied with a brush; it is then set to dry, and finally fired in the kiln, which must be heated sufficiently to fuse the component parts of the glaze or enamel into one smooth vitreous coating, while on the other hand it must not be hot enough to soften or melt the clay body of the vessel. The use of oxide of lead enables a glaze to be applied to a clay body which would not stand the high temperature necessary to combine and fuse a pure silico-alkaline glaze. In order to prevent the glaze or enamel from blistering or cracking off there must be a certain similarity of substance between the clay body and the vitreous coating. A fine silicious glaze or enamel will not adhere to a soft fat clay unless the proportion of silica in the latter is increased either by admixture of a harder, more silicious clay, or by the addition of pure silica either in the form of sand or of ground flint.

The Potter's Wheel.— All pottery, except the rudest and most primitive sorts, is moulded or “thrown” by the aid of a very simple contrivance, a small round table fixed on a revolving pivot. Fig. 1, from a tomb-painting at Thebes, shows its simplest form. The potter at intervals gives a spin to the table, which continues to revolve for some time without a fresh impulse. This form of wheel, used by the Egyptians (as is shown by existing fragments of pottery) about 4000 b.c., is still employed without any alteration by the potters of many parts of India. A later improvement introduced in Egypt under the Ptolemies was to have another larger circular table, fixed lower down on the same axis, which the potter set in movement with his feet, and thus was able to keep up a regular speed and leave his hands free for the manipulation of the clay (see fig. 2). No process in any handicraft is more beautiful than that of a potter moulding a vessel on the wheel. The ease with which the plastic clay answers to the touch of the hand, and rises or falls, taking a whole succession of symmetrical shapes, and seeming, as it were, instinct with the life and thought of the potter, makes this art beautiful and striking beyond all others, in which the desired form can only be at-, tained by comparatively slow and laborious methods. Ancient poetry is full of allusions to this. Homer (Il., xviii. 600) compares the rhythm of a dance to the measured spin of a potter’s wheel; and the rapid ease with which a clay vessel is made and remade in a new form is described by Jeremiah (xviii. 3-4) in one of his most forcible similes (compare Horace, A. P., 21-22). Among the Egyptians of the Ptolemaic period the potter was used as a type of the Creator. Nouf or Knoum, the divine spirit, and Pthah, the creator of the mundane egg, are symbolized by human figures moulding clay on the potter’s wheel. The wheel and egg are shown above in fig·

Kilns for firing Pottery.— The earliest form of kiln, as represented in Egyptian wall-paintings, is a tall circular chamber of brick, with a perforated floor near the bottom. The fuel was introduced from an opening on one side, and raked in under the brick floor. The pottery to be baked was piled up in the upper part of the chamber. Fig. 3, from a potter’s votive tablet from Corinth, shows an early Greek form of kiln, with a place for the fuel on one side, and a door in the side of the upper chamber through which the pottery could be put in and withdrawn. The Corinthian kiln differs from the Egyptian kiln in being domed over, but it is the same in principle.

Even at the present day kilns shaped almost exactly like this early Greek one are still largely used.

Section I.— Prehistoric.

The art of making pottery is one of the most extreme antiquity; with the exception of the cave-dwellers of the Drift or Palaeolithic period it was practised by all known prehistoric races from the Neolithic age downwards. The sepulchral barrows of Britain and other European countries have supplied vast stores of this earliest kind of pottery. It is mostly formed of coarse clay, generally brown in colour, though sometimes grey or reddish; some few specimens are fine in texture and have a slightly glossy surface. The clay, while moist, has been kneaded with some care, and is often mixed with a proportion of gravel, coarse sand, quartz crystals, or pounded pottery. The more carefully made specimens, chiefly those of the bronze and iron ages, are frequently covered with a smooth slip, made of the same clay as the body, but finely pounded and thoroughly mixed. All are alike “hand-made,” without any assistance from the potter’s wheel; some of the smaller ones are scooped out of a solid ball of clay, while in some cases great skill has been shown in the building up, by the unaided hand, of the thin walls of larger vessels, some of which are so round and neatly formed as to appear at first sight to be wheel-made. This, however, is never the case with the pottery of the three great prehistoric periods.

The shapes found in the sepulchral barrows of Britain, France, Scandinavia, and other countries are usually classified thus—(1) cinerary urns, (2) food vessels, (3) drinking-cups, and (4) the so-called “incense cups” (see fig. 4).

(1) Cinerary urns, usually found full of burned bones, are the largest, varying from 12 to 18 inches in height. They are mostly less ornamented and less carefully made than the smaller vessels. Most have their decoration confined to a band round the upper part of the pot, or often only a projecting flange lapped round the whole rim. A few have small handles, formed of pierced knobs of clay, and sometimes projecting rolls of clay looped, as it were, all round the urn. (2) Food-vessels vary considerably in size and form. Some are shaped like a tea-cup, with a handle on one side; others are like small cinerary urns, either quite plain or with pierced knobhandles and bands of ornaments incised or impressed. (3) Drinking-cups, mostly from 6 to 8 inches high, vary but little in form, and are usually completely covered with ornament. They are often made with considerable care and skill, and are not ungraceful in shape. The names given to the preceding three classes possibly express their real use, but the name of the fourth class, “incense cups,” is purely imaginary. Under this head are comprised a number of small vessels of very varied shape, some with their sides pierced through with square or lozenge - shaped openings, while others, almost globular in shape, have several pierced knob-handles, as if for suspension. Some are quite plain, and others are covered with ornament. Their use is unknown; one possible suggestion is that they were intended to carry fire from some sacred source to light the funeral pyre. Canon Greenwell, probably the best authority on this subject, believes, contrary to the opinion of many antiquaries, that none of the above classes of barrow-pottery were intended for domestic use, but that they were made solely to be buried with the dead. He considers that a fifth class of pottery, chiefly in the form of bowls, which has occasionally been found, not in barrows but in dwellings, is the only kind that was actually used for domestic purposes by prehistoric man (see Greenwell, British Barrows, 1877).

The ornament whieh is often lavishly applied on prehistoric pottery is of especial interest. It frequently consists of lines of small dots impressed from a notched niece of wood or meta), arranged in various patterns—crosses, chevrons, or zigzags. All the patterns were stamped into the body of the pot before it was hardened by fire. The lines were frequently made by pressing a twisted thong of skin against the moist clay, so that a sort of spiral sunk line was produced. Other bands of ornament were made by wooden stamps; the end of a hollow round stick was used to form a row of small circles, or a round stick was used sideways to produce semicircular depressions. In some cases the incised lines or dots have been filled up with a white slip of pipeclay. Considerable taste and invention are shown by many of these combined ornaments, and a certain richness of decorative effect is produced on some of the best drinking-cups; but one thing is to be noted: all the main lines are straight, no wavy lines or circles appearing, except in very rare instances—a fact which points to the very limited artistic development attained by the prehistoric races.

Prehistoric pottery has sometimes been described as “sun-baked,” but this is not the case; however imperfectly baked, the pieces have all been permanently hardened by fire, otherwise they would certainly not have lasted to our time. This was done in a very rough and imperfect manner, not in a kiln but in an open fire, so that in some cases the pots have received a superficial black colour from the smoke of the fuel. Great quantities of this pottery have been found in the sepulchral barrows of Great Britain and Ireland; those from the latter country are usually very superior in neatness of execution to the British specimens. The British Museum is specially rich in this class of pottery, chiefly the result of excavations made in British barrows by Canon Greenwell.

For prehistoric pottery, see Greenwell, British Barrows, 1877; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 1865; Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, 1880; D∙ Wilson, Prehistoric Man, 3d ed., 1876, and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 18<⅛∣. Keller, Lake-Dwellings in Switzerland (tr. by Lee, 1878); Bonstetten, Kecueu <l' Antiquités Suisses, 1855-57; Perrin, Etude Préhistorique, 18<0; lroyon, Habitations Lacustres, I860; Borlase, Narnia Cornubiae, 1872.

Section II.— Ancient Egyptian.

But few examples remain which date from the time of the earlier dynasties of Egypt, though from the XVIIIth Dynasty downwards a great quantity of specimens exist. Broken fragments, embedded in the clay bricks of which some of the oldest pyramids are built, supply us with a few imperfect samples whose date can be fixed. The early pottery of Egypt is of many varieties of quality: some is formed of coarse brown clay moulded by hand without the aid of the wheel; other specimens, thin and carefully wheel-made, are of fine red clay, with a slight surface gloss, something like the “Samian’’pottery of the Romans. Some fragments of brown clay have been found, covered with a smooth slip made of a creamy white or yellowish clay. The early use of fine coloured enamels, afterwards brought to such perfection in Egypt, is shown by the enamelled clay plaques in black, white, and greenish blue which decorated the doorway of the great step-pyramid at Sakkàra. Each plaque has a pierced projection at the back, so that it could be firmly fixed by means of a wood or metal dowel.

Egypt is rich in materials for pottery, both glazed and enamelled. The finest of clays is washed down and deposited by the Nile; the sandy deserts supply pure silica; and a great part of the soil is saturated with the alkali necessary for the composition of vitreous enamels and glazes. In spite, however, of this abundance of materials the Egyptians never learned to apply either their enamels or their glazes, both of great beauty, to their larger works in pottery made of the fine Nile clay. The reason probably was that the clay was too fat, and therefore a vitreous coating would have flaked off during the firing, while they had not discovered the simple expedient of mixing with the native clay an addition of sand (silica), which would have enabled both glazes and enamels to form a firm coating over the body of the vessel. The colours used for Egyptian enamels and glazes are very varied, and of great beauty and brilliance. The glazes themselves are pure alkaline silicates, free from lead. The enamels are the same, with the addition of oxide of tin. The metallic oxides used to give the colours are these,— various shades of blue and green, protoxide of copper, or more rarely cobalt; purple and violet, oxide of manganese; yellow, iron or antimoniate of lead; red, sub-oxide of copper or iron; black, magnetic oxide of iron or manganese. The white enamel is simply silicate of soda with oxide of tin. The blues and greens, whether used in transparent glazes or opaque enamels, are often of extreme magnificence of colour, in an endless variety of tints,—turquoise, ultramarine, deep indigo, and all shades of blue passing into green. The most remarkable specimens of Egyptian enamel work are some clay plaques or slabs, about 10 inches high, which were used to decorate the walls of Ranieses II.’s palace at Tel al-Yâhùdiya, in the Delta (14th cent, b.c.). These have figures of men and animals executed in many different colours in the most complicated and ingenious manner. They are partly modelled in slight relief, and then covered with coloured enamels; in other parts a sort of mosaic has been made by mixing fine clay and enamels into soft pastes, the design being fitted together and modelled in these coloured pastes while moist. The slab was then fired, and the enamel pastes were at once vitrified and fixed in their places by the heat. A third process applied to these elaborate slabs was to fit into cavities left for them certain small pieces of coloured glass or brilliant enamels, giving the effect of precious stones, which were fused into their places by a second firing. The chief figures on the plaques are processions of captives, about 8 inches high; the enamel flesh is varied according to the nationality of the prisoners: negroes are black, others white, red, or yellow. Some of the dresses are represented with great richness: various embroidered or textile patterns of the most minute scale are shown by enamel inlay of many colours, and even jewel ornaments are shown by the inserted bits of glass; the dress of some Assyrian captives has patterns of great beauty and richness, —the sacred tree between the guardian beasts, and other figures. Besides these elaborate figure-reliefs an enormous number of smaller pieces of clay inlaid with different-coloured pastes were used to form a sort of mosaic wall-decoration in this wonderful palace, the ruins of which have supplied a perfect museum of all kinds and methods of enamelled work as applied to pottery. The British Museum and the Louvre have the finest specimens of these wall-slabs (see Birch, Ancient Pottery, p. 51, 1873).

The term “Egyptian porcelain” has sometimes been given to the small mummy-figures in brilliant blues and greens. This is a misnomer. The little figures, about 3 to 6 inches high, of which immense numbers have been found, mostly dating from about the XXth Dynasty downwards, are simply formed of sand (silica) with a little alkali, and only sufficient clay to cement them together, so that they could retain the form given them by the mould into which they were pressed. The result of analysis is silica 92, alumina 4, and a slight but varying proportion of soda. They are covered with a silicious glaze, brilliantly coloured with copper oxide, and are sometimes painted under the glaze with manganese, a deep purple-violet. A few of these figures, and also small statuettes of deities, have had oxide of tin mixed with the paste; the figure has then been exposed to sufficient heat to fuse the whole into one homogeneous vitreous mass, and thus the statuette has become a solid body of fine blue enamel. A few small objects—such as libation cups, bowls, and chalice-like goblets—were also made of the same sandy paste, covered with blue-green glaze. They are thick and clumsy owing to the very unplastic nature of their paste, which necessitated their being pressed in a mould, not wheel-made. The splendour of their colour, however, makes them objects of great beauty; they usually have a little painting, lightly executed in outline with manganese purple, generally a circle of fishes swimming or designs taken from the lotus-plant (see fig. 5).

During the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties and later pottery was used in many ways for wall-decoration. Bricks or tiles of coarse brown clay were covered with a fine white slip and glazed with brilliant colours. Another method was a sort of inlay, formed by stamping incised patterns into slabs of clay and filling up the sinkings with a semi-fluid clay of some other colour, exactly like the 16th-century Oiron ware. A number of brilliant wall-tiles covered with deep blue glaze, and painted in black outline with figures and hieroglyphs, have been found in many places in-Lower Egypt; the painting is very simple and decorative in effect, drawn with much skill and precision of touch.

The Canopic vases are an important class and great quantities have been found in Egyptian tombs. They are generally made of plain brown-red clay, and have a lid in the shape of a human head. On them hieroglyphs are coarsely painted in black or colours (see fig. 6). They contained parts of the viscera of the corpse. The mummies themselves are frequently decked out with pectoral plates, necklaces, and other ornaments, made of clay covered with blue and other coloured enamels. Some of the pectoral plates are very elaborate works of the same class as the figure-reliefs from Tel al-Y<4hιidiya, richly decorated with inlay of different-coloured pastes and enamels.

During the Ptolemaic period a quantity of graceful and well-executed pottery was made in fine red and brown clay, mostly without any painted decoration. Some of the vases are of good form, owing to the influence of Greek taste (see fig. 7); others are coarsely decorated with rude painting in blue, green, red, yellow, and brown, either in simple bands or with lotus and ether flower-patterns (see fig.

8). Both the body of the vases and the colours are usually quite devoid of any gloss. The duller colours are various earths, ochre, and white chalk, while the bright blues and greens are produced by mixing powdered enamel of the required colour with light-coloured clay, the depth of the tint depending on the proportion of the clay or chalk.

Certain very gaudy and ugly pots were made to imi-täte granite and steatite vessels (see fig. 8). They are of brown clay, rudely dabbed and speckled with brown, red, yellow, and grey colours to represent the markings of the stone; others are yellow, with grey streaks — imitations of marble; most have a painted white tablet, on which are hieroglyphs in black. The pigments are very shiny in texture, and appear to be unfired. Among the most delicate and carefully made kinds of Egyptian pottery are the round flat flasks shaped rather like the mediaeval “pilgrim-bottle” (see fig. 9). They are sometimes made of blue paste, fine clay coloured with oxide of copper, and are delicately enriched with impressed ornaments, stamped from a mould, in low relief or slightly incised. The ornament is often designed like a gold necklace hung round the bottle; others have tablets with inscriptions. The surface is biscuit; and the flasks range in colour from light turquoise to deep ultramarine, the colour not being superficial but of equal strength all through the paste. Small vases of other forms, made of this same material, also occur, but they are rare.

Literature.— Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians (ed. Birch, 1878); Birch, Ancient Pottery, 1873. A large number of works on ancient Egypt have some account of the pottery, but none are specially devoted to the subject. The most valuable contribution to the chronological arrangement of Egyptian pottery is contained in an article by Flinders Petrie, published in the Archεeological Journal for 1883, vol. xl. p. 269. See also Pierret, Dictionnaire d'Archéo· logic Égyptienne, 1875; De Rougé, Études Égyptologiques, 1880; and Mariette, Monuments du Musée ... à Boulaq, 1864.

Section III.— Assyrian.

But little remains to us of the pottery of the primitive Accadian races of Babylonia and Assyria. It was all extremely simple and undecorated, partly hand-made and partly wheel-made, mostly graceful and natural in form, owing its beauty chiefly to the simple elegance of its shape and the fine material of which it was made,—the close-grained light yellow and brown clays in which the country between the Tigris and the Euphrates is so rich. The great city of Babylon—“figulis munitam urbem,” as Juvenal (x. 171) calls it—was essentially a brick city, and depended for its magnificence to a great extent on such decoration as the potter could supply. Herodotus and Ctesias describe its lofty circuits of brick walls, the two inner walls lined with bricks enamelled in various colours, with figure-subjects, scenes of war and hunting (see Babylon). The technical methods and enamel pigments used in Assyria and Babylonia were for the most part the same as those used in Egypt; but the Assyrian potters understood the use of oxide of lead as a flux to mix both with glazes and enamels,—an admixture which, though it to some extent injures the durability of the vitreous surface, enables it to be applied with greater ease, and to less silicious clays, without fear of its cracking off or blistering in the kiln.

The ruined palaces of Babylon and Nineveh have supplied great quantities of bricks painted in various colours, some as early as the 12th century b.c. The colours applied are of two distinct classes,—(1) thoroughly vitrified enamels, often coarse and bubbly in texture, and applied in considerable body, which are mostly brilliant though harmonious in tint, with a hard vitreous surface; (2) earth colours, chiefly ochres in various shades of quiet yellows and browns, owing their colours to different iron oxides and a pure white made of lime. The earth colours are very thinly applied, and have no surface gloss. Paintings executed in this manner were neither so hard nor so durable as those in the vitrified enamels, and were probably used mainly for panels of ceilings and the upper parts of walls, which were out of the reach of ordinary wear or injury. In a few paintings both methods are combined. The bricks themselves are of light brown or yellowish clay, with which a considerable quantity of straw was mixed. This was burned out in the firing, and so cavities were left, making the bricks light and porous. Many of the enamelled bricks are moulded in relief, with simple patterns of leaves, interlacing bands, waves, and the like, and were used to form cornices and running bands above and below the flat friezes or dados painted with human figures. The reliefs are picked out in colours with enamel, white, yellow, deep orange, soft red, brown, green, and blue, the enamel being sometimes nearly one-eighth of an inch thick. A common size for the bricks is 12 to 14 inches long by 6 to 7 wide, and about 4 inches thick. Sometimes two or three courses go to make a single moulded band. The British Museum and the Louvre possess the best specimens of these enamelled architectural features. The finest examples of pictured bricks were found in the great palace at Nimrùd; they appear, judging from the imperfect fragments that remain, to illustrate a victorious expedition by the Assyrians against a foreign nation. The paintings represent long lines of captives, and processions of the conquering Assyrians on foot, on horseback, and in chariots. They are executed, on grounds of different colours—dull green, yellow, and blue—and show a strong feeling for harmony of colour and great skill in decorative arrangement; the figures are about 9 inches high. Some complete paintings were executed on one slab or panel. A fine one, about 9 inches by 12, also found at Nimrùd, and now in the British Museum, has a picture of the Assyrian king under a fringed canopy giving audience to an officer. The king is followed by an attendant eunuch.

In addition to figure-subjects and ornaments, large wallsurfaces were covered with cuneiform inscriptions, having letters about 1∣ inches high painted in white and yellow on blue or green grounds; these are executed on large slabs of coarse brown clay, to which a smooth surface, fit for painting, has been given by a thin coating or slip of fine-ground yellowish clay. Large slabs with pendants for ceilings, painted in the same way with very graceful patterns, have been found, all in simple earth colours. Another even more magnificent application of the potter’s art to wall-decoration was by the use of coloured enamel pastes, like those described under the pottery of Egypt. These are reliefs modelled by hand, or pressed into clay moulds and then touched up by a modelling tool. The smaller ones, with delicately-executed figures in low relief, are all in paste of one colour—blue—with sufficient enamel added to the clay to give it a brilliant tint, but not sufficient for complete vitrification. Other fragments exist of life-size or even colossal figures, both in the round and in high relief, worked in pastes of many colours in a kind of mosaic fashion, extremely brilliant and striking in effect.

The most remarkable application of pottery in Assyria and Babylonia was its use for literary records. Tablets, cylinders, and polygonal prisms were impressed with cuneiform characters in the moist clay, and then baked, thus forming the most imperishable of all kinds of MSS. (cp. Babylonia, vol. iii. p. 191). The large inscribed cylinders and prisms were made hollow, and turned on the potter’s wheel. The prisms were first moulded in a circular shape, the sides being afterwards made flat by slicing. All are circular inside, and bear distinct ring-like marks, showing the movement of the wheel as they were scooped out by the potter’s thumb.

The vases and domestic vessels of Assyria may be divided into four classes,—(1) plain biscuit clay, undecorated; (2) biscuit clay with painted decorations; (3) fine clay stamped with minute reliefs; (4) clay glazed or enamelled.

(1) By far the greater proportion of the pottery belongs to the first class. It is frequently graceful in shape, is well made and baked, and is of a fine close clay, generally light in colour. Fig. 10 shows some of the commonest forms. Some specimens have cuneiform inscriptions incised with a pointed tool in the same way as the cylinder letters. The coarser clays are usually covered with a fine whitish slip, and a rather rare variety of the pottery is made throughout of a close-grained almost white clay. One sort of pottery, of which very few specimens have been found, has simple patterns incised on the grey body of the vessel; these patterns were then made conspicuous by being filled in with white clay, a method of inlay like that used in Egypt. (2) Very few examples of the second class are known. Some vases of brown clay, covered with white slip, have rude paintings of human figures, bowmen and other soldiers, executed in brown outline, with rapid and skilful touch. Others have cuneiform inscriptions and geometrical floral patterns painted in silica and lime-white with yellow and brown ochres. They appear to belong to the 9th century b.c. Both the clay body and the earth pigments are quite free from any vitreous gloss in all this class of ware. A few fragments have been found of a coarse brown pottery, decorated with simple patterns in gold leaf, applied after the ware was fired. (3) A very fine sort of Assyrian pottery, of which examples exist dating from the 10th to the 8th century b.c., is made of a close-grained ivory-white clay, or else a hard greyish black clay; the surface is biscuit, and is ornamented with bands of human figures in relief, —soldiers, captives, royal personages, and others, with representations of cities, all most minutely executed, the figures scarcely an inch high. Other bands have cuneiform inscriptions, also in delicate relief. The bands appear to have been formed by rolling a cylinder die or mould over the surface of the clay while soft and moist. The few specimens of this pottery that have been found are mostly in the form of cylindrical drinking-cups. This method of decoration is one largely used in the earliest variety of Etruscan pottery. (4) Glazed and enamelled pottery (see fig. 11) is more abundant; it consists chiefly of small articles of fine clay, bottles, two-handled jugs, miniature amphorae, and pilgrim - flasks, very carefully made, and apparently articles of luxury. Some are of white clay, covered with a colourless glaze of silicate of soda, rendered more fusible by the addition of oxide of lead. Partly owing to this addition the glaze is generally in a very decomposed state, often presenting the most brilliant iridescent colours. Other examples are coated in a similar way, except that the transparent glaze is tinted a brilliant blue or green with oxides of copper, very like the blue glaze so much used in Egypt, but usually less hard and bright in colour. A few small specimens have been discovered coated with a white tin enamel. Both the glazed and the enamelled pottery is undecorated by any painting.

At Warka (the Chaldaean Erech) a large number of very curious clay coffins were found in cave-tombs stacked closely one upon another. They are made of coarse clay, and bear outside patterns rudely stamped in blunt relief; the whole is covered with a plumbo-silicious green glaze. They are about 7 feet long and very peculiar in form; the body was introduced through an oval opening at the head, over which a similarly glazed clay lid fitted closely. These coffins are probably not earlier than the Sasanian period. Clay coffins of much greater antiquity have been found in Babylonia, but they are of plain biscuit clay.

Literature.— Layard, various works on Nineveh and Babylon; Rich, Babylon and Persepolis ; Loftus, Chaldaeaand Susiana, 1857; Oppert, Expédition Scientifique en Mésopotamie ; Lepsius, Denkmäler, part ii. p. 163; Botta, Monument de Ninive, 1847-50; Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie, 1866-69.

Section IV.— Phoenician and other Archaic Classes.

The discoveries of recent years have opened out a new field in the history of the origin and growth of Hellenic art, especially as relating to pottery. Excavations in Cyprus, Rhodes, Thera (Santorin), the plains of Troy, Mycenae, Attica, and the coasts of southern Italy have revealed the existence of an abundant class of pottery of great antiquity, a large part of which, in its forms and decoration, appears to have been due, directly or indirectly, to the Phoenicians. The designs are of a curiously complex character. Purely Assyrian motives, such as the sacred tree with its guardian “cherubs,” are mingled with figures and ornaments peculiar to Egypt; other characteristics which modify and blend these two styles seem due to the Phoenicians themselves; while, lastly, various local influences are shown in the representations of such plants and animals as were commonest in the special place where the pottery happened to be made. Possibly some of the designs, such as the sacred tree of Assyria, might be traced farther back still, to the distant Asiatic home of the Indo-European races; but any derivation of this kind would, in our present state of knowledge, be purely conjectural.

The islands of Thera, Rhodes, and Cyprus, which were colonized by the Phoenicians at a very early period (see Phoenicia, vol. xviii. p. 804 sq.), have supplied large quantities of archaic pottery, ornamented with characteristically Phoenician patterns and figures. The equally rich finds of pottery from Mycenae and the Troad, though not free from Phoenician influence, have mostly a more native style of decoration. Though in some few cases the finding of Egyptian objects with dated hieroglyphs suggests a probable age for the pottery they were found with, yet in the main it is impossible to give even an approximate date to this large class of archaic pottery. Its production evidently extended over many centuries, and little or no help towards a chronological classification is given by any clearly-defined stages of artistic development. Some of the earlier specimens may possibly be as old as the 18th century b.c. (scarabs of Amenhotep III. were found with pottery in Rhodes), while later ones, not very different in style, were probably made as late as the 8th century. Forms and Materials of Archaic Pottery.— There is a special charm about this early pottery. Graceful as the Greek vases of the best period of art are, there is something rigid and slightly mechanical in their highly-finished beauty, their polished surface, and their shape, accurately produced after some fixed model, from which but little deviation was permitted. Endless varieties of form occur in archaic pottery, changing with the mood and individuality of each potter; full of spirit and life, in their easy grace and the multiplicity of their flowing lines, these simple clay vessels give one—more perhaps than any other works of art—that keen aesthetic pleasure which consists in a retrospective sympathy with the joy that the artist took in his own handiwork. Extreme fertility of invention, as well as the utmost freedom of touch in the manipulation of the revolving mass of clay, are its chief characteristics. Fig. 12 gives some of the many forms.

It is usually thin, light, and well baked, formed either of pale buff, whitish, or straw-coloured clay; or, if a darker clay is used, the surface is generally covered with a fine white slip composed of silica, lime, and a little alumina. This forms a ground for the painting, which is executed in ochre earths, browns, and reds of different shades, the colours of which are due to oxides of iron. Most of the pottery is biscuit, clay ground and painted ornament being alike free from any gloss; but in some cases silica and an alkali (probably carbonate of soda) have been added to the ochre pigment, which has thus become vitrified in the kiln and acquired a glossy surface. This does not occur among the earlier specimens.

Enamelled Pottery.— In some of the tombs in Aegina and Rhodes a quantity of small vases, statuettes, and other objects have been found, executed under Egyptian influence, with decoration of various coloured enamels. The colours used and the methods of manipulation resemble the enamel work of Egypt so closely as to need no special description. Some fine pilgrim-flasks of blue and green have blundered copies of hieroglyphs and representations of Egyptian deities incised in the moist clay. Less purely Egyptian in style are certain small vases (see fig. 13), coarsely ornamented with bands and chevrons in various enamels—white, blue, green, purple-brown, and yellow. The Louvre and the British Museum have the best specimens of these. Small vases, exactly similar in design and execution to those from Aegina and Rhodes, have been found in the tombs of Vulci and other places in Etruria, probably brought there by Phoenician traders, to whose intercourse with Egypt and knowledge of the Egyptian designs and mechanical processes the existence of the enamelled pottery of Rhodes is probably due. Other specimens have been found in the recently discovered Etruscan necropolis on the Esquiline in Rome. One curious variety of early pottery is of a fine glossy red like the later Samian ware. Its smooth surface of rich red is due to the application of a thin finely-ground mixture of silica, soda, and some alumina, forming a vitreous enamel to which the opaque red colour was given by a large proportion of oxide of iron (see fig. 14). Some of this red pottery is of extreme anti quity; it is either smooth and undecorated, or has rudely-incised hatchings and zig-zags, scratched down to the clay body of the vessel through the red enamel. Another variety of very early pottery from Mycenae and the Troad is of a hard black clay, with glossy surface (see fig. 15).

Painted Ornament on Archaic Vases.— This may be divided roughly into four classes. (1) Hatchings, concentric circles, chevrons, and other simple combinations of lines, arranged frequently in designs obviously suggested by matting or textile fabrics, and also various arrangements of spirals, apparently taken from patterns used in metal-work. Some of the designs of this class seem common to all races of men in an elementary stage of progress, and occur on the earliest known pottery, that of the Neolithic age (see fig. 16). (2) Representations of plants (often seaweeds) and marine animals, such as cuttlefishes, medusae, and star-fishes, or occasionally aquatic birds. This class of ornament appears to be more native in character—derived, that is, from various objects with which the potter was familiar—and not to have been a Phoenician import (see fig. 17). (3) Conventional ornament, a decorative arrangement in bands or scrolls of certain plants, such as the lotus or papyrus and the palm-tree. This class of ornament is distinctly Phoenician, and shows a predominance, sometimes of Assyrian, sometimes of Egyptian influence (see fig. 18).

(4) Very rude and badly-drawn figures of men and animals. They are mostly purely decorative and meaningless, are often merely drawn in outline, and have little or no help from incised lines, which became so important in the next stage of the development of pottery. Some of the figures are strongly Assyrian in character, while others of the rudest execution seem to be native.

It appears at first sight as if there was a distinct chronological order of development in these four classes of ornament—growing from simple line - patterns to the copying of easily represented natural objects, then to the invention of regular geometrical floral patterns, and lastly arriving at the rude depiction of human figures. Various points, however, combine to contradict such a theory of arrangement, such as the combinations in which these vessels have been found, the manner in which the various classes of ornament are mingled on the same vase, and lastly the fact that some elaborate and highly-finished vases, obviously of later date, are decorated solely with the straight-line and hatched patterns of the first of the four classes of ornament. Again, the ornament of the second class, which appears to be native and local, can hardly be so altogether. Pottery found at places so far distant as Rhodes and Mycenae has in some cases exactly similar painting of this sort, showing that a common artistic influence was at work in both places. The whole subject is a very difficult one, and little that is really definite can be asserted about it with safety—at least as yet.

Fig. 19 gives two vases of great interest. One shows the common decoration with wheel-applied circles, and also the Assyrian altar-like object between two beasts; the other, from Cyprus, has the Assyrian sacred tree, with similar guardian animals. One of the most striking characteristics of archaic pottery of all classes, and especially of the earliest, is the great use made of the potter’s wheel in applying the painted ornaments. Very many of the vessels are decorated with a number of encircling bands or lines, or on their sides with a number of concentric circles. These were easily applied, and very true circles were obtained by setting the pot (after it was dried in the sun) for a second time on the wheel, in the required position, either on its side or upright as it was originally turned. A brush held against the revolving vessel marked out the bands or circles. A very interesting votive tablet from Corinth (now in the Louvre), probably 700-600 b.c., shows a potter at work in his shop, applying painted bands in this way. He sets the wheel in motion with one hand, while with the other he holds the brush against the revolving pot. The wheel here shown (see fig. 20) is one of the earliest form, without the lower foot-turned disk. The smaller circles were struck out with compasses, the central point of which has usually left a deep mark. The patterns used on the first class of pottery consist mostly of straight lines, hatched and crossed, arranged in squares, chevrons, triangles, and other simple figures, combined with concentric circles or, more rarely, wavy bands, the whole arranged frequently in very complicated and effective patterns. The second class has frequently varieties of seaweed and many marine creatures, all treated very simply, but drawn with great skill and appreciation of the characteristics of each object and its decorative capabilities. The third class—that of geometrical floral patterns—has but little variety. Some of the lotus patterns are almost identical with those used in Egypt and Assyria, and continued in use for vase decoration down to the most flourishing period of Greek art, though latterly in a stiff and rather lifeless form. The fourth class—that of figurepaintings—is of great, interest; the earlier patterns are merely drawn in outline. Fig.*21 shows an cenochoe from Cyprus, now in the British Museum, of rather coarse red clay with yellow slip, on which is pencilled in outline a one-horse chariot driven at full speed by a slave; behind him stands a bowman shooting an arrow; the whole is strikingly Assyrian in style. Another cenochoe, found in Attica, of more primitive style, has a central band covered with a number of warriors with round shields, all alike, most rudely executed; almost exactly similar figure-paintings occur on some of the Mycenae pottery, and also on a large amphora from Cyprus (now in the British Museum), which has many bands, on which are painted in red ochre lines of men with crested heads (looking like North - American Indians) riding long weasel-shaped horses. Other bands on the same vase have centaurs, foot - soldiers, and various beasts, the latter, especially some stags, rather better drawn. They are painted in coarse dabs, and, except for a few of the eyes, have no incised lines. Smaller ornaments, such as the svas-tica ⅛ and simple forms of rosettes, are often used to decorate the backgrounds and fill up spaces, but not to so great an extent as in the succeeding class of pottery.

Among the earlier pottery from Mycenae and the Troad are several very strange vases in coarse clay rudely modelled to indicate a human form. Some have the upper part formed like a head, very like the Egyptian Canopic vases. A great number of “pithi” (πίθοι), enormous vases shaped something like amphorae, have been discovered in Rhodes, the Troad, and other places, some as much as 7 feet high. Such vessels are often decorated with patterns in relief, chiefly combinations of spirals and the like, some closely resembling the designs on the sculptured architrave from the “Treasury of Atreus” at Mycenae.

Vases with Bands or Friezes of Animals on Grounds sprinkled with Flowers.— This is a very large and important class, and very numerous specimens have been found widely scattered over the shores of the Mediterranean (see fig. 22). The production of vases of this style appears to have lasted for many centuries; the earlier ones are rudely executed in dull ochre colours on biscuit clay, like most archaic pottery, while the later ones have paintings in brilliant black enamel on a ground of red clay, thinly covered with a true vitreous glaze. This class of vase-painting, though mostly the work of Greek potters, is distinctly Oriental in character, probably Assyro-Phoenician.

It is of extreme decorative richness: the surfaces of the vases are well covered, and the designs, though simply treated, are very effective, in many ways far more successful as works of decorative art than the elaborate and exquisitely drawn figure-pictures on later Greek vases. The ground is thickly covered with small decorative patterns; fig. 23 shows those used on more archaic vases. The animals that occur most frequently on the bands are lions, leopards, bulls, goats, deer, with various birds, such as cocks and swans, and also griffins, sphinxes, and sirens. A favourite motive of design is the sacred tree or a sort of column, each with a guardian beast at the sides. This is one of the most interesting of all designs in the history of ornament; it dates from an extremely early period, was used in ancient Chaldaean art, and was handed on by the Sasanians to the Moslem conquerors of Persia; it survived, though altered and after its meaning was long forgotten, till even the 15th century in the textile fabrics worked in Italy after Oriental designs. The column between the beasts occurs on the Lion Gate of Mycenae. In the later art of the Persians a fire-altar takes the place of the column.

Before passing on to consider the various classes of distinctly Hellenic pottery it will be convenient to give a list of the technical methods employed in all classes of pottery found in Hellenic sites, and also some account of the inscriptions and various forms of letters which are found on Greek vases.

Technical Methods and Inscriptions—Archaic and Greek Vases.

1. Prehistoric Pottery from Mycenae, the Troad, and other Hellenic Sites.—Materials·, yellow, red, or black clays; composition, silicate of alumina, with free silica and lime, coloured by different oxides of iron; slip, made of similar clays ground to a smooth paste. Methods of treatment : (a) plain biscuit clay; (δ) clay covered with fine slip; (c) ornament of incised patterns, scratched through the slip upon the body of the pot, and sometimes filled in with whiter slip to make a conspicuous pattern; (d) pottery of hard fine clay, made glossy by a mechanical polish. Most if not all of this pottery was made without the wheel; but some was so skilfully modelled as to make it difficult to distinguish between hand-made and wheel-made vessels.

2. Phoenician and other Archaic Pottery. — This and all succeeding classes are wheel-made. Materials : clays and slip as class 1; a quite white slip was also used, made of a natural sort of pipeclay, or in some cases of a mixture of lime and silica with a little clay to bind it together. Pigments : earth-colours, made of brown and red ochres, occasionally mixed with an additional quantity of oxide of iron and free silica. Methods : the white or yellow slip was usually applied while the vase was revolving on the wheel, either with a brush or by the potter dipping his hands into a bowl of fluid slip just before finishing the final modelling or throwing of the vase; in some cases it has been applied by dipping the pot into the slip. The method of applying the painted bands is shown above in fig. 20. As a rule these vases were not fired at a sufficient heat to give them a vitreous gloss, though in some cases the heat has been enough to partly vitrify those of the ochre colours which contained a proportion of free silica and alkali.

3. Vases with Plack Figures and Incised Lines. —Materials : (a) clay, silica 56 per cent., alumina 19, red oxide of iron 16, lime 7⅜, magnesia 1⅜ per cent.,—the average of many analyses; (δ) slip, the same clay finely ground, and sometimes tinged a deeper red with additional red oxide of iron,—the white slip is like that in class 2; (c) glaze, of almost imperceptible thickness, a silicate of soda; (d) black pigment,—a true vitreous enamel, which owes its deep black to the magnetic oxide of iron (composition—soda 17, silica 46, alumina 12, black peroxide of iron 17, lime 6 per cent.); (e) chocolate-red pigment, an ochre red sometimes mixed with finely-ground fragments of red pottery; (∕) white pigment, like the white slip of class 2,—various analyses, silica 54 to 62, alumina 34 to 43, lime ⅜ to 3⅜ per cent. Methods : the vase was first turned on the wheel, and, in order to give the pot a surface of deeper red, the slip was applied by a brush or by the hands of the potter while it was still revolving. The outline of the design was next roughly sketched, either with a point or in light-red ochre with a brush. After the vase had dried sufficiently in the sun so as to become firm, it was again put on the wheel, and the glaze, finely powdered and mixed with water, was applied to it with a brush as it revolved. The vase then appears, at least in some cases, to have been for the first time fired in the kiln in order to get a smooth almost nonabsorbent surface for the use of the painter. In other cases the materials of the red slip and the silicate glaze were mixed, and the two applied together, as was done in the case of the Roman Samian ware. The painter next set to work and put on the black enamel figures and ornaments with a brush. If a part of the vase round its whole circumference was to be black, such as the foot and neck, the vase was again set on the wheel and the black enamel put on as it revolved. This repeated use of the wheel for the application of slip, glaze, and black enamel was in order to secure an even coating with uniform grain, far more difficult to get with the unaided brush. The grain thus produced can usually be distinctly traced in each of the three coatings. The firing of the black enamel must have been done with great care and skill, as a very slight chemical change in the black oxide of iron converts it into the red oxide. Thus the same stroke of a brush is often (in the earlier vases of this class) half black and half vermilion-red, or one side of a vase is red and the other black, according as it has been played upon by oxidizing or deoxidizing products of combustion in the kiln. In the finest vases the black enamel is of great beauty, with wonderful rich softness of texture, which no modern skill has been able to approach. The tombs of Nola, Capua, and other places in Magna Graecia have supplied the most technically perfect vases, both for the fineness of their clay and the brilliance of their black enamel. After the firing of the enamel the details λvere drawn in by incised lines, cutting through the enamel down to thé clay body of the vase. The clear and slightly-chipped edges of the lines show that they were done after firing, when the black enamel was in a hard vitreous state. This must have been done with some very sharp and hard point, probably a natural crystal of diamond or corundum, such as was used for engraving gems; the incised details on some vases are of almost microscopic minuteness. The “non-vitreous” colours, red and white, were sometimes put on before, sometimes after the incised lines. They were fixed in their place by a slight firing, not enough to vitrify them or to soften the edges of the incised lines in the enamel. Both these changes have been shown to take place under a not very violent heat, by experiments made by the present writer on fragments of such vases. The white was used to depict the flesh of females and of some of the gods, such as Eros, or for the bodies of horses and the hair of old men. Chocolate-red was mostly used for ornamental touches on dress, armour, harness, and the like. Both are used in painting the heraldic beasts or ornaments which so often occur on the round shields of Greek warriors. Both the white and red are applied over the black. Thus the female figures are first completely painted in black, and the white afterwards applied over the face, hands, or other nude parts.

4. Vases with Red Figures.— The materials employed and the first stages in the manufacture of this class are the same as those of class 3; but, instead of the figures being painted in black, the ground is covered with black enamel, and the figures left, showing the glazed red slip which covers the whole vase. This method produced a great artistic advance in the beauty of the figures, the details and inner lines of which could be executed with freedom and ease by brush-marked lines instead of by the laborious process of cutting incised lines through the very hard black enamel. The outline of the figures was drawn, with wonderful precision and rapidity, with a brush fully charged with fluid enamel, boldly applied so as to make a broad line or band about one-eighth of an inch wide all round each figure, one edge of the band giving the boundary of the required form. Details and inner markings were then added with a fine-pointed brush capable of making the thinnest and most delicate strokes. On many of the finest vases the contourlines of muscles and other markings intended to be less salient were painted in pale brown instead of black. Last of all, the main part of the ground between the black outline bands was filled in. The greater thickness of the enamel, where it was more concentrated in the bands, is generally visible; the enamel used for filling in was thinner because it spread over a larger space as it flowed from the brush. In some cases a face or other part has had a thin black outline before the wider band was put on; and then three distinct thicknesses of enamel can be seen, the thin outline standing out perceptibly more than the rest. It is evident that the fluid black enamel was applied in a somewhat thick viscid state, and thus a slight degree of relief was often produced, enabling black lines to show over the black ground, as is the case sometimes with the strings of lyres. This slight relief often gives additional effect to the treatment of curly hair, represented by a series of dots or globules, as in the transitional amphora described below (p. 612). This method recalls the free use of the drill in the representation of hair on early engraved gems. Touches of white and red were occasionally used, as in the preceding class of vases, but to a much more limited extent. Some of the finest black and red vases, especially specimens from Nola, Vulci, and Capua, have enrichments in gold applied in relief.

5. Polychromatic Vases.—Materials: the same as in the nreced-

ιng class with the addition of bright red, blue, green, and gold. The red used on some vases is an oxide of iron; but a very brilliant minium crimson also occurs, which appears to have been added after the final firing, and is not therefore, properly speaking, a “ceramic” pigment. The blue and green are different oxides of copper, fused with silica and soda to make a bright vitreous enamel, which was then finely powdered and mixed with a proportion of white pigment (silica and lime) according to the strength of the tint required. This powdered enamel pigment is the “smalto” of mediaeval Italian painters. The gold was applied in leaf, not on the flat surface of the vase, but on a ground modelled in slight relief with semi-fluid slip of ordinary fine red clay, thus very much enhancing the effect produced by the gold leaf. Necklaces, bracelets, and other gold ornaments are always modelled in perceptible relief, producing a rich effect which no merely flat application of gold could give. Polychromatic vases may be divided into four main classes, (a) Vases in which the colours are used as additional decoration to the ordinary red figures, e.g., the celebrated amphora from Camirus (Rhodes), with the scene of Peleus winning Thetis as his bride (see Plate V.). (&) Vases painted in brown outline, on a fine white slip, with the addition of red and yellow ochre colours, and occasionally a little gold, c.g., the cylix in the British Museum with Aphrodite seated on a flying swan (see Plate V. ); this is a rare and usually very beautiful variety, and is more fully described below (p. 613). (c) Attic funeral lecythi, which have the neck and foot in brilliant black (wheel-applied) enamel and the main body of the vase covered with a non-vitreous white slip. The design was sketched in rough outline and the red pigment put on with a small brush over the white ground. The drawing is generally careless and rapid, but often shows great skill and beauty of touch. The colours, generally red, blue, or green, were then thickly and often clumsily applied over parts of the red outline drawing, mostly over the draperies. These vases were not meant to be handled, as their colours rub off very easily: they were simply intended for sepulchral purposes, either to hang on the stele or within the tomb, (d) Vases, especially from Magna Graecia, such as rhytons, small oenochoae, and others, moulded skilfully in a variety of fanciful shapes, heads of animals or deities, sphinxes, and other figures, either grotesque or beautiful. They are decorated partly with the usual red figures, and with the most brilliant black enamel, while other parts are painted in white and brilliant crimson with further enrichments in gold leaf. These bright colours seem to have been applied after the last firing, and not to be true ceramic colours.

6. Black Vases of Metal-like Designs.— These vases often have the finest sort of black enamel, especially the large amphorae from Capua and other places in Magna Graecia, covered all over with fluting or gadroons. Some have wreaths of vine, olive, and other plants, or imitations of gold necklaces modelled in slip, slightly in relief, and afterwards covered with gold leaf. A number of “phialae omphalae” (saucer-shaped vessels), of about 200 b.c., were made by being pressed into a mould, and were thus stamped with figures in relief, such as processions of deities driving chariots. Some of these, made in Magna Graecia after its conquest by the Romans, have Latin inscriptions. One made at Cales is inscribed with the potter’s name C. CANOLEIOS. L. F. FECIT. CALENOS (see Ann. Inst., 1883, p. 66). Small asci were decorated with highly-finished figure-subjects, stamped on emblemata or tablets of clay, which were embedded in the vase while it was soft. Such elaborate and metal-like pieces of pottery are entirely covered with black enamel. They are often of great beauty, both in the composition of the relief figures and in their delicate execution. Vases of this class have been found entirely covered with gold or silver leaf, copies of metal plate.

7. Vases, such as large asci, many from Magna Graecia, made of simple yellowish biscuit clay, and modelled into shapes of female heads, or covered with a number of statuettes of female figures. They are generally painted simply in distemper in “non-ceramic” colours; but they fall rather under the head of Terra-cotta (q.v. ). Some are of very great beauty, and are covered with statuettes very like those found at Tanagra.

8. Greek Vases of Debased Style, last period.— These have the usual red figures on a black enamel ground, of the same materials, and applied in the same way as on the earlier vases, except that the black enamel is much thinner and very inferior in quality, frequently having a hard metallic gloss instead of the soft richness of the earlier vases. A great part of the figures and ornaments is executed in white, red, brown, and yellow pigments, with shading and gradations of colour, used to produce an effect of relief, which is unsuited to vase-painting, and, especially in the later examples, is executed with extreme rudeness and clumsiness of drawing. Vase-painting became degraded in style at a period when the other arts of Greece showed but little signs of decadence, and ceased altogether to be practised nearly a century before the Christian era. No painted vases were found in the buried cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae; and Suetonius {Julius Cεesar, c. 81) mentions the easemess with which certain Greek vases found in tombs near Capua were sought for. The floral ornaments on these later vases are very elaborate and realistic compared with those of the earlier period. Bands of graceful scroll-work with growing foliage are much used, often, in spite of their attempted relief, very beautiful and much superior to the figure-subjects which accompany them. Some strikingly resemble in style the painted friezes on Pompeian walls, and have lost all purely ceramic character.

Two abnormal and comparatively rare methods of vase-painting must be mentioned. One occurs on a number of Corinthian vases mostly now in the Louvre, pseudo-archaic in style, but apparently of the 5th century b.c. Such were first covered with white slip, which was in turn completely covered over with black enamel. The design was then made by the awkward process of cutting away the black in parts so as to leave black figures on a white ground— a kind of “sgraffiato.” Another strange method was practised in southern Italy during the extreme decadence of vase-painting. The whole surface was covered with black enamel, and the figures were afterwards painted in red over the black so as to imitate the ordinary Greek vases with red figures and a black enamel painted round them. Most specimens are mere feeble imitations of the works of an earlier period; but a cylix in the British Museum is painted in this style with a graceful seated figure of Adonis or Meleager,—a very remarkable work, executed in warm browns and yellows, giving the effect of flesh, and shaded and touched with high lights in a thoroughly pictorial manner, which, though on a miniature scale, recalls the best wall-paintings of Pompeii or Rome.

Inscriptions on Vases. — Inscriptions are very numerous during the middle period of Greek art, while on the most archaic vases and those of the decadence they are mostly absent. They are of great interest in the history of Greek palaeography, but are not always a safe guide as to the dates of vases, because archaic forms of letters were often used by vase-painters long after other forms of letters had come into general use. Vase-inscriptions may be divided roughly under two heads—Ionian and Dorian, the latter occurring mostly on the numerous vases from Corinth and her colonies. The accompanying table shows the usual forms of letters which differ from the New-Attic alphabet; the latter is still in use, and has been but little changed since about 400 b.c., when the long vowels were introduced. Some of the early letters have no representative in the lateι ’ Greek alphabet, e.g., the digamma F, the koppa 9, and the aspirate 0 or H. [table]

One of the earliest vase-inscriptions known is that mentioned below (see fig. 24, p. 611) as occurring on a “pinax,” or large flat platter, with archaic painting in brown, found at Camirus in Rhodes and now in the British Museum. Each figure has its name thus—

t v *Γ ’ E.ΛΛD z )

S∕ΦOpBθ(v ∖

for MENEΛAΣ, EKTOP (retrograde), and EYΦOPBOΣ. This curious inscription has the Ionian form of E, the Dorian Μ (san) for Σ. and a common archaic form of Θ for Φ, a very strange and exceptional combination of characters. The Burgon Panathenaic amphora (see fig. 25) has a very curious Old-Attic inscription, written downwards—

for TON AΘENEΘ[E]N AΘΛON E[I]MI, “I am one of the prizes from Athens,” the usual inscription on prize vases. Vaseinscriptions are usually painted, if on a red ground in black or brown, if on a black ground in red or white. Some are incised, scratched after the vase was fired; but such occur less often. They are written both retrograde and from left to right, apparently without any fixed rule. Both methods frequently occur in the same inscription. A fine early Corinthian crater, found at Caere and now in the Louvre, with black figures representing Heracles feasting with Eurytius, has the names of the persons represented inscribed in the characteristic early Dorian manner—

5YPYTiOM MθT>Φ>-λ

∕√oia MsnxAflaa for EYPYTIOΣ, TIΦITOΣ, fIOΛA (Viola, a lady present at the feast), and HEPAKΛEΣ. On the handle of the crater is scratched 90, for Corinth, the place where it was made. Another Dorian inscription of great interest occurs on a votive clay tablet dedicated to Poseidon, about 4 by 2⅜ inches, now in the Louvre. Poseidon is represented at full length, holding a trident and a wreath, in black with incised lines; at each corner is a hole for fixing the tablet to the temple wall. It is inscribed—

v ∣AΔ^To∏

H ’ ∙or rKFfcefcKB∙

for ΠOTEIΔAN . . . ON ΜΆΝΕΘΗΚΕ, “—on dedicated me to Poseidon.” This curious tablet was found at Corinth; the letters aie very archaic in form, though the painting can hardly be earlier than the 6th century b.c. j

The great majority of vases have inscriptions in Old-Attic characters, such as are shown in the two following examples. The subjects of the inscriptions may be divided into five heads, though other miscellaneous ones also occur.

(1) On early vases rudely scratched trade-marks, or potters’ marks, indicating the number of vases in a special batch and their prices. (2) Potters’ and artists’ names. The majority have only one name, possibly that of the master-potter, e.g.,

∣>vχS∣ΘEoi Ero∣E∙iE^

for Eι⅛i0eos iτroiησev. In other cases, mostly on the finest vases, the name of the painter occurs as well as that of the potter, e.g.,

MAKPON EΛPAφSEN

for ~MΛκρωv typaψev. Some artists, probably distinguished for their skill, painted the vases of several potters; other painters’ names chiefly occur on the vase of one special potter. (3) Names of people, animals, and even things represented on the vases. A large proportion of the earlier vases have a name by the side of each figure, or at least by the side of the most important ones. Names of horses and dogs occasionally occur, and in a few instances even inanimate objects are designated by a name, e.g., the balance on the cylix of Arcesilaus in the Paris Bibliothèque and Zeus’s throne on an early amphora in the Louvre. (4) Speeches uttered by the vase figures, e.g., in a scene representing a game at ball one of the players says XPHΣAN MOI TAN ΣΦ[A]IPAN, “Throw me the ball.” Other vases have words of compliment or greeting, such as XAIPE, “Hail!” or words relating to their contents, e.g., HΔYΣ ΟΙΝΟΣ, “The wine is sweet.” (5) Names of owners, often with the ad jective ΚΑΛΟΣ or ΚΑΛΕ (if a lady), possibly intended for gifts, like the majolica plates inscribed with a lady’s name followed by the epithet “diva’ or “bella. An amphora with a very curious inscription has recently been found at Orvieto, in early Attic characters—ZHAIΘ3MIAΗ0VHH0YΔ (retrograde) —meaning δυ δβeλω κal μe θiyes, “Two obols, and you have me.”

A quite different species of inscriptions occurs on vases of the latest class. Artists’ and potters’ names cease to appear with the rapidly-increasing decadence of the art. A black crater in the British Museum has a dedicatory inscription painted in white round the neck, ΔIOΣ Σ∩THPOΣ, “Zeus the Saviour.” A fine black fluted amphora has the owner’s name, APICTAPXO APICT∩NOΣ, in which the late C form of Σ occurs. On a small black ascus in the British Museum is scratched rudely ΠΡΟΠΙΝΕ MH KATΘHIΣ, “Drink, do not set me down.” And some plain black measures have their capacity incised on them, e.g., HEMI-KOTVΛION, “Half a cotylion,” on a cup-shaped vessel from Corcyra. One of the earliest known instances of Greek cursive writing occurs on a covered pyxis divided into four compartments (in the British Museum). It appears to have been used to contain the ashes of a Roman called Sergius. Under the foot is rudely scratched—

“My beloved Sergius, farewell.” The last word is blundered And on the inside of the lid is a similar incised inscription—

“It is the second interment.” The pyxis is apparently much older than the inscription, a supposition which is confirmed by the note as to its being a later burial.

One sort of inscription, used more largely by the Romans than the Greeks, was impressed from incuse stamps, a method chiefly used for large amphorae and other vessels of plain biscuit clay, especially those made in Rhodes and Cnidus. These inscriptions, which date from the time of Alexander the Great down to the 1st century after Christ, usually give the name of an eponymous magistrate or chief priest, and have frequently in addition one of the thirteen months of the Doric calendar. Some of the stamps are circular, copied from current Rhodian coins, and have the legend round a front face of Helios, or the rose-blossom ρόδον, which was the badge of the island. Other stamps are square or lozengeshaped; they are usually impressed on the neck or handle of jars.

Having considered the technical methods employed in the manufacture of Greek vases and the various classes of inscriptions which occur upon them, we will now return to the styles of vase-paintings and the subjects which are most frequently represented.

Section V.— Hellenic. Archaic Class.— The manner in which the styles of ornament on early pottery merge almost insensibly one into another makes it difficult to arrange it in distinct classes, and it is not easy to say at what precise stage the term “Hellenic” can be given to the archaic vessels. The presence of Greek inscriptions makes, however, a convenient starting-point.

Probably the earliest known Greek ceramic inscription occurs on the Rhodian pinax mentioned above (see fig. 24). The painting on this, though rudely executed in brown and red ochres on a pale yellow slip-covered clay, the same in method as the earlier non-Hellenic paintings, shows a marked artistic advance by the fact that it represents a definite historical scene taken from the Iliad. No incised lines are used except for the feathers of the heraldic eagle on Hector’s shield. A large number of other pinaces were found at Camirus, of the same date, but without inscriptions and with purely decorative paintings, such as geometrical lotus-patterns, and spirited figures of bulls, sheep, and other animals, or sphinxes and gorgons’ heads. Some large clay coffins, also found at Camirus, and others at Clazomenae, belong to this class of pottery. One of those from Camirus is in the British Museum. The top is decorated with painting in red and brown ochre colours.

At the head is a bull between two lions, and below them two curious helmeted heads of warriors drawn in profile, both unfortunately much injured by restoration. Other parts are decorated with figures of beasts on a ground studded with rosettes and other small designs, in which some antiquaries see varieties of solar symbols; but, whatever their original meaning may have been, they appear on this pottery to be used merely as decoration. Other vases of a very early period with figure-subjects and inscriptions, probably of the 7th and βth centuries b.c., have been found at Corinth, such as the “Dodwell pyxis,” now at Munich, on the lid of which is painted the scene of the Calydonian boar hunted by various heroes in the presence of Agamemnon; each figure has an inscribed name. At Corinth also curious votive tablets have recently been found, some inscribed, with painted figures either of the god or of the donor; one of these is shown in fig. 20. It is very early in date.

The “Burgon amphora,” so called from its finder, now in the British Museum (see fig. 25), is a very interesting specimen of this early class; it is one of the prize amphorae which, filled with sacred olive oil, were given to the victors at the games held during the Panathenaic festival. It was found at Athens, filled with the ashes of its owner, and is no doubt the work of an Athenian potter. On one side is the usual figure of Athene Promachos in black, except the goddess’s flesh, which is white, and the inscription and touches on the dress, which are in crimson. On the reverse side is the winner of the vase driving a biga, apparently in the act of winning the race which gained him the prize. On the neck of the vase is the owl sacred to Athene. The drawing of the figures is very rude, probably dating from the 6th century B.c.

The “François crater,” found at Chiusi, now in the Etruscan Museum in Florence, is another important example of this early class. It is signed as the work of the potter Ergotimus and the painter Clitias, and is painted with a long series of subjects, all relating to the life and death of Achilles. It has no less than 115 explanatory inscriptions. Of about the same date, 6th century b.c., is the cylix of Arcesilaus found at Vulci, now in the Paris Bibliothèque. It is painted in black and red on a creamwhite slip, and represents Arcesilaus, one of the Cyrenian kings of this name, superintending the weighing of a number of bags of the silphium plant. All the figures and even the scales have their names painted by their side. It is executed with great neatness and technical skill, but the drawing is stiff and awkward. The scene, which is represented with great dramatic vigour, appears to be on board a ship, judging from the complicated cordage overhead and the yard-arm from which the large balance is suspended.

It is at present impossible to fix with any certainty the dates of this early Hellenic pottery, as is also the case with the still older pottery of Rhodes and Mycenae, but the increase of our knowledge on the subject tends to give a much more remote period to its production than has been hitherto assigned to it by the majority of writers on the subject. The foregoing class of pottery forms a link, with various stages of development, from the glossless vases painted in dull ochre browns and reds to that large and important class of Greek pottery which has figures painted in glossy black enamel, on a red, slightly glazed, clay ground, or less frequently on a cream-white ground. The vases of this class, found in large quantities over a wide area in Greece, Italy, and Sicily, include paintings of the most different kinds, from the rudest almost shapeless daubs to the most carefully-executed pictures, drawn with great beauty of composition and firm accuracy of form, though always retaining some amount of archaic stiffness and conventionalism. Though the faces are nearly always represented in profile, the eyes are shown front-wise, a method of treatment which continued in use even on the earlier vases of the next period, those with red figures on a black ground. Fig. 26 shows the progressive treatment of the human eye by vase-painters, from the earliest introduction of figures down to the end of the 4th century B.c.

Many of the floral ornaments of this period still retain clear signs of their Oriental origin. The sacred tree of Assyria, in an elaborate and highly conventionalized form, very frequently occurs, or, worked into a running pattern, it forms a continuous band of decoration, out of which the Greek so-called “honeysuckle pattern” seems to have been developed. These vases have far greater variety and richness in their decorative patterns than those with the black ground, the natural result of the great ease and freedom of hand with which delicate floral designs could be touched in with the brush in black, while in the later manner the red patterns had to be laboriously left out by working the black ground all round them. Hence the stiffness and poverty of invention which are so remarkable in the decorative patterns on the vases of the “best period.” Many of the black figures of men and animals are executed with extraordinary minuteness, owing largely to the engraved gem-like treatment with which the incised lines are applied, especially in the representation of the hair of men or animals, and also in the rich textile patterns with which the draperies are often covered. Some of the vases, judging from their general form and thin band-like handles, were evidently copied from metal vessels, as, for example, a number of small amphorae found in various places, executed in the workshop of Nicosthenes, a rather inartistic potter, who appears to have turned out a large number of vases with little or no variety in shape or ornament.

The later vases, with black figures, were produced simultaneously with the earlier ones decorated with red figures; and during this transitional period (about the middle of the 5th century b.c. ) some vase-painters worked in both styles, both kinds of painting sometimes occurring even on the same vase. The British Museum possesses one of the finest specimens of these, a large amphora with nobly-designed paintings. On one side are two seated figures of Greek warriors, probably Ajax and Achilles, playing at a game like draughts. They are painted in black with chocolate-red touches, and minute details, such as the drapery over their armour and their wavy hair, executed in incised lines of extreme fineness and gem-like treatment. The other side of the vase has red figures on a black ground, a most powerfully drawn group of Heracles strangling the Nemaean lion in the presence of Iolaus, and an archaic statue-like figure of Athene. As in the painting with black figures, some touches of red are used. The treatment of Heracles’s hair is peculiar and again recalls gem-engraver’s work, in which hair is represented by a series of drilled holes; in this painting the stiff curls are given by a number of round dots of the black enamel, applied in considerable body so as to stand out in relief. This treatment frequently occurs on the fine vases of this and later periods, and the same method is occasionally used in a very effective way to represent bunches of grapes and the like.

Vases with Black Ground and Red Figures.— After about the middle of the 5th century b.c. this method superseded that with the black figures, and to this class belong the finest vases of all. The drawing of the earlier specimens is strongly sculpturesque in style, sometimes recalling the noble though slightly archaic pediment figures from Aegina, while the vase-paintings of a few years later seem to belong to the Phidian school; the forms are noble and massive, treated with great breadth and simplicity, and kept strictly to one plane; faces are nearly always drawm in profile, and all violent foreshortening of limbs is avoided. Some vase-painters-of this period (c. 450-400) retain a slight touch of Oriental feeling in their drawing, as, for instance, the beautiful amphora by Euxitheus in the British Museum, which has single figures of Achilles and Briseis, one on each side (see fig. 27).

It should be remarked that the style of vase-paintings is generally rather archaic as compared with other branches of contemporary art, as was the case with their inscriptions, and a certain conventionalism of treatment, such as would not be found in sculpture, lingers till quite the end of the 5th century b.c. Fig. 28 shows a painting from the inside of a cylix, remarkable for the severe beauty and simple grace of its drawing and composition. The scene represents the moment when Peleus has won Thetis for his bride, and is leading her away in triumph, gently overcoming her modest reluctance; her shrinking and yet yielding attitude is drawn in the most refined and masterly manner possible.

In the succeeding centurv both d rawin σ and eomn∩sit,i∩n began to gain in softness and grace, while losing something of their old vigour. Vase-paintings become more pictorial, and the compositions more elaborate and crowded; the British Museum has an amphora from Camirus (Rhodes), one of the most beautiful of this later class, elaborately decorated on one side with various coloured pigments and gold applied over the finished black and red figures. As in the earlier cylix of fig. 28 the scene represents the final triumph of Peleus in his pursuit of Thetis; in order to fill up the space some of the figures are placed, as it were, in the air, a method of composition peculiar to the later vase-paintings. Though not highly finished in details, such as the hands and feet, this picture is a perfect marvel of skilful touches rapidly applied, and of extreme beauty of form and general composition (see Plate V.). The funeral lecythi from tombs in the neighbourhood of Athens are a remarkable class of vases, c. 350-300 b.c. (see fig. 29). On these, over a white ground, are painted scenes representing mourners visiting sepulchral stelae with offerings in their hands. They are drawn carelessly, but with great skill, in red outline and then coarsely filled in with colours. Some of the seated females are designed with wonderful grace and pathos, the whole pose full of a tender longing for the departed one. Besides the funeral lecythi a few pieces of pottery have been found, dating from about the same period, which have paintings executed on a ground of white slip. Some of them are of most extraordinary beauty; perhaps the finest of all is a cylix from a Rhodian tomb, now in the British Museum, on the inside of which is a drawing, chiefly in outline, representing Aphrodite seated on the back of a flying swan. For delicacy of touch and re fined beauty of drawing this painting is quite unrivalled. The exquisite loveliness of Aphrodite’s head and the pure grace of her profile, touched in with simple brush-formed lines, are quite indescribable, and show a combination of mechanical skill united to imaginative power and realization of the most perfect and ideal beauty such as no people but the Greeks can ever have so completely possessed (see Plate V.).

Vases of the Decadence.— The vases of this class are often of enormous size, covered with very numerous figures, often possessing much graceful beauty in form, but very inferior in execution and purity of drawing to the earlier paintings. The figures, especially in the later specimens, are thoroughly pictorial in treatment; many of them are painted in creamwhite, with shaded modelling in yellows and browns. Effects of perspective are introduced in some of the architectural features, particularly in the bands of rich floral scroll-work. In the 2d century, till about 100 b.c., when painted vases ceased to be made, the paintings became extremely coarse and devoid of any merit whatever, though even at this time moulded vases, either decorated with reliefs all over or with small inserted emblemata, continued to be made of great artistic beauty. The extreme degradation to which vase-painting of this period fell seems to be due not so much to the general decay of the arts among the Greeks as to the fact that the vases were no longer made by able artists, but were turned out in large quantities from the hands of an uneducated class of artisans. This was probably partly owing to increasing wealth and love of display, which created a demand for gold and silver plate rather than for the cheaper but more artistic beauty of painted clay.The dates of Greek vases are difficult to fix, partly from a natural tendency to archaism, which varies with the productions of different places, and partly because in some cases there was an artificial reproduction of old styles and methods. The following chronological classification, which is commonly accepted, is only very roughly correct, and is not applicable in all instances: (1) black figures on red ground, about 8th century to 440 B.c.; (2) red figures on black ground, of the best period, c. 440-300 B.C.; (3) period of decadence, c. 300-100 B.C. Fine moulded black vases, and vases with polychromatic paintings of good style, were made towards the end of the 4th and early part of the 3d century b.c. Shapes of Vases and their Use.— From the 5th century and afterwards but’little scope was left to the fancy of the individual potter in the forms of his vases. One special pattern was pretty closely adhered to for each sort, though, of course, modifications in shape took place as time went on. Fig. 30 gives the forms of the chiefsorts of vases; a large number of others exist, each with its special name. Amphorae and hydriae are the largest and most important, and have the grandest picture-subjects painted on them. The cylices frequently have paintings of wonderful delicacy and beauty; the later Athenian lecythi are remarkable for their polychromatic decoration. The uses of the painted vases is a very difficult question; few show any signs of wear, though they are made of soft clay easily scratched, and most of those which are represented in use on vase-pictures are plain black without any paintings. A beautiful little pyxis, or perfume-box, in the British Museum, shows in its pictured scene of a lady’s toilet several painted vases, which are set about the room as ornaments, and nave flowers or olive-branches in them (see fig. 31). Many vasesare blank on one side, or have on the reverse side a painting of inferior execution, apparently because they remained set against a wall or in a niche. Nearly all those now existing came from tombs, and it is probable that the ornamental vases were selected for sepulchral purposes, while a plainer and less decorated class was employed for actual domestic use.

Panathenaic Amphorae. — This is a very important class of vases, extending over a long period, from th⅛, 6th to the end of the 4th century B.C. Fig. 25 above gives the earliest known specimen. They all have on one side a figure of Athene Promachos, and on the other a scene from the public athletic games. They are inscribed TON AΘENEΘEN AΘAON EIM1, and some of the later ones have the name of the eponymous archon as well, e.g., ΠYΘOΔHΛOΣ ΑΡΧΩΝ on an amphora from Caere, now in the British Museum. Pythodelus was archon in 336 b.c., and so the date of the vases thus inscribed can be accurately determined. A number found at Benghazi and Teuchira in the Cyrenaica are now in the British Museum and the Louvre. Some of the archons’ names on them are these—Nicocrates (333 b.c. ), Nicetes (332 B.C.), Euthy-critus (328 b.c. ), Cephisodorus (323 b.c. ), Archippus (321 b.c.), and Theophrastus (313 b.c. ). The figure of Athene on all of them is rudely painted in pseudo-archaic style—the figure in black and white, with incised lines, on a red ground; the other side is painted in the same way, but is not archaic in drawing. Long vowels occur in the archons’ names, but sometimes the same amphora has the obverse inscription written in the old way. They are all poor as works of art. One in the British Museum is of special interest from the design painted in white on Athene’s shield. This is the celebrated sculptured group of Harmodius and Aristogiton by Critias and Nesiotes, of which an ancient copy exists in the Naples Museum, though the bronze original is lost.

Subjects of Vase-paintings.— These are of great interest, and are almost endless in number; only the scantiest outline can be given here, and, with so wide a range, any classification is necessarily imperfect. The following list includes the majority of subjects. (1) Stories of the gods, scenes such as the Gigantomachia or the birth of Athene. (2) Scenes from the heroic age, as the achievements of Theseus and Heracles, the wars of Thebes, the battles with the Amazons, the voyage of the Argonauts, the Trojan War, the return of the Greeks from Troy, and the like. (3) Dionysiae subjects, such as orgies of Dionysus and dances of satyrs. (4) Scenes from real life, such as the vintage, olive-gathering, marriages, feasts, dancing, hunting, sacrifices, and theatrical subjects. (5) Funeral subjects, as mourners bewailing the dead or bringing offerings to a tomb. (6) Scenes from the gymnasium and various athletic exercises. (7) Allegorical subjects, with figures of happiness, wealth, youth, and the like. (8) Historical subjects, which, however, are rare: a very fine vase in the Louvre, of the best period, has Croesus on his funeral pyre; the cylix of Arcesilaus has been mentioned above; Anacreon playing on his lyre, and followed by his pet dog, occurs on several fine vases; the meeting of Sappho and Alcaeus is also represented; other portrait - figures appear, chiefly of poets and philosophers, many with inscribed names which are now unknown. (9) Humorous subjects: these are common on the vases of the latest period and are usually very coarsely painted; caricatures of mythological subjects frequently occur in which the gods are represented as dwarfs or hunchbacks. Places where Greek Vases have been found.— Till within the last twenty years most were discovered in the tombs of Magna Graecia, Sicily, and Etruria. Capua, Nola, and Vulci supplied a very large quantity of vases of the finest sort with the most rich and brilliant enamel. Special characteristics of style and technique can be traced in the production of special localities, but these differences are not very important. Of late years Attica, the isthmus of Corinth, and other places on Hellenic soil have yielded a great many fine vases; the islands of the Aegean Sea and the western shores of Asia Minor are rich in sepulchral stores of these and all branches of Greek art. Athens possesses a fine and rapidly-increasing collection chiefly from Attica. The British Museum collection is on the whole the finest for Greek vases of all periods, though it is very poor in Etruscan pottery. The other chief collections of Europe are in the Louvre, at Naples, in the Vatican, at Florence, and Turin; Munich, Vienna, Berlin, and St Petersburg also have very fine collections; and there is a small one in the Bibliothèque, Paris.

Section VI.— Prehistoric and Etruscan in Italy.

Very many of the numerous vases discovered in the tombs of Etruria {q.v.} are imports either from Greece and its islands or from the neighbouring country of Magna Graecia. Nevertheless there is a large class of pottery which is distinctly native, extending over a very long period, from quite prehistoric ages down to the time when the Roman rule extended throughout the peninsula. This pottery maybe divided into six classes,—(1 ) prehistoric; (2) black glossy Etruscan; (3) pottery rudely painted with figures of purely Etruscan design; (4) plain biscuit clay, unpainted, but decorated with stamped reliefs; (5) later vases, badly-executed imitations of painted Greek vases, but having Etruscan subjects, or Greek subjects treated in a distinctly Etruscan manner; (6) large clay slabs, with painted figures, used for the wall-decoration of tombs.

1. Prehistoric.— This is the work of the Siculi, Oscans, Umbrians, and other occupiers of Italy before the arrival of the Etruscans. It is mostly small, made without the wheel, of coarse brown or blackish clay, slightly ornamented with ridges of clay modelled in relief. One curious variety is in the form of a primitive Oscan hut, with a movable door, fixed with pegs. The Museo del Collegio Romano has a fine collection of the prehistoric pottery of Italy, Sardinia, and other places. Fig. 32 shows some of the commonest forms.

2. Etruscan Black Ware. —It is remarkable that the Etruscan race, though so extraordinarily skilful in most of the handicrafts, did not excel at any period in their pottery. They were especially famed for their skill in metal-work, and hence perhaps this largest and most numerous class of their fictile ware is mostly shaped after metal forms and decorated with designs not specially suited to clay. The clay of which this black ware is composed consists (taking the average of many analyses) of the following ingredients,—silica 63, alumina 15, peroxide of iron 8, lime 3∣, magnesia 2, and carbon 2. It is hard and metallic in appearance, generally of a glossy black, but sometimes grey. Its black is partly due to the superficial presence of free carbon, showing that the vases were fired in a close kiln, under the direct contact of the carbonaceous smoke from the fuel, a process called in modern times “the smother kiln.” If heated to a bright red in an open fire the ware loses its black colour and becomes greyish white or brown. Its forms and the figures stamped in blunt relief all suggest that they were copied from metal originals, a supposition strongly borne out by the fact that many of them are completely covered with gold or silver leaf (see fig.

33). The reliefs upon them consist of lions and other animals, sphinxes, chimaerae, human figures, or geometrical patterns, all coarsely executed, and very blunt in their forms, nartlv from want of sharpness in the moulds they are stamped from, and partly through the shrinkage of the clay in the kiln. Some of the shapes are graceful, especially those undecorated by reliefs (see fig. 34). Others are very fanciful, worked into forms most unsuited for clay, such as “situlae” or buckets, with movable ring handles; incense cups supported on thin bands of clay stamped with reliefs; and jugs shaped like hollow rings. A few have their shapes copied from Greek vases, e.g., a number of small amphorae of exactly the same form as those made by the Greek potter Nicosthenes. A common form of Etruscan vase has a lid shaped like a human head, copied apparently from Egyptian Canopic vases. Some have human arms rudely modelled in clay and fastened on by pegs. Besides the black vases of this form, there exist many made of red clay covered with yellow slip.

3. Etruscan Painted Vases.— A number of very strange large covered jars have been found at Caere (see fig. 35), more than 3 feet high, and rudely painted in dull colours (black, red, and white) with large figures of animals,—lions, wolves, horses, various birds, and some almost shapeless figures of men. There is considerable spirit in the drawing of the animals, as is often the case even when there was no power to delineate human beings. The finest of these vases are in the Louvre and at Orvieto. Some have only geometrical patterns,—bands of simple leaf-ornament, platbands, or chequers.

Others are shaped like large round boxes on a foot, with lids, nearly 2 feet high. One of those in the Louvre, of red clay blackened by smoke, has a very curious drawing in white pigment, coarsely executed. It represents a merchant-ship under full sail being attacked by a war-ship impelled only by oars; the latter is crowded with soldiers bearing round shields, each with an heraldic device. The other vessel has only one combatant, a bowman, who, mounted on the yard-arm, discharges an atrow at the enemy. This appears to be a pirate scene, and, though very rudely painted, it is not without strong dramatic force.

4. Fuses in Biscuit Clay with Bands of Stamped Reliefs. —These are mostly large pithi (see fig. 36) about 3 feet high, or thick pinaces (platters) 1 to 2 feet across. Some are of dull red clay, covered with bright red slip; others are yellow. The clay is coarse, mixed with crushed granite, sand, or pounded pottery, to which the coating of fine clayslip gives a smooth surface. Their chief peculiarity consists in the bands of figures in relief with which they are decorated, and which were impressed on the soft clay by rolling along it wheels about 1 inch thick and 7 or 8 inches in circumference. Incuse figures were cut on the edges cf the wheels, which, when rolled over the clay, printed (like seals) rows of figures, and they were of course repeated every 7 or 8 inches, according to the size of the wheels. These stamped reliefs, mostly about an inch high, represent processions of animals,—lions, leopards, boars, ibexes, deer, horses, or griffins. Some have human figures, horsemen fighting with chimaerae. One in the Louvre has a curious hunting-scene, a man, with two dogs, throwing short knobbed sticks to drive hares into a net. The bands are arranged, singly or double, round the rims of the pinaces and the shoulders of the pithi; the latter are also ornamented with rude fluting or “reeding” below the bands, or have occasionally reliefs,

2 to 3 inches square, stamped at intervals all round them instead of the continuous lines of figures.

5. Later Vases until Imitations of Greek Paintings.— These are mostly copies of Greek forms, but very inferior, both in drawing and technical execution, to the real Greek vases, the black enamel especially being thin, and hard in texture. In appearance they resemble Greek vases of various periods, but are distinguishable by having paintings that are not Hellenic in subject or treatment, or by their Etruscan inscriptions. An amphora, now in the British Museum (see fig. 37), of early style, with black figures and incised lines, has a painting of a scene which belongs specially to Latin mythology, viz., the contest at Pylus between Hercules and Juno Sospita; Minerva stands behind Hercules and Poseidon behind Juno. On each side of Juno is a caldron full of snakes, probably an allusion to the sacred serpent which was kept in the grove of Juno at Lanuvium. Another amphora in the Paris Bibliothèque has a painting of the scene where Admetus takes leave of Alcestis before her descent to Hades (see fig. 38). Two hideous demons are depicted, waiting to seize their prey: one, Charun, with winged feet, brandishes a massive hammer; the other, Mantus, with great white wings, holds a serpent in each hand; both have a fiendish aspect, with grinning teeth, like the devils in mediaeval pictures of hell, and thoroughly unGreek in spirit. This vase is in the style of the decadence of vase-painting, probably about 200 b.c.

6. Painted Wall-slabs were used to decorate the walls of tombs; they are from 4 to 5 feet high, about 2 feet wide, and about 1 inch thick. The upper part sometimes has a moulded cornice and a painted frieze with geometrical ornament. The lower part is covered with chequered squares or some other simple pattern. On the intermediate space are painted pictures with figures, about 2 feet high, representing sacrificial scenes, religious processions, and other subjects. The drawing shows Greek influence, but the costumes are Etruscan. The pigments are mostly simple earth-colours, red, brown, and yellow ochres, with black, white, and bluish grey; but bright greens and blues also occur, the latter made from oxides of copper, like the smalto on the Attic lecythi. The colours are all applied quite flatly; the female flesh is white, the male red; and the whole painting is emphasized by strong black outlines. The costumes are interesting; many of the garments fit tightly to the body, and the men mostly wear a peculiar sort of high boot turned up at the tip. It is doubtful whether they are executed in true ceramic colours fired in the kiln. They may possibly be only tempera paintings, like those on the tuff-walls of some of the excavated tombs. The great size of the well-baked clay slabs on which they are painted shows that the Etruscans must have constructed pottery-kilns of considerable dimensions. Inscriptions on Etruscan Vases.— Painted words or phrases are not uncommon on the vases which are imitated from the Greek: they are usually illustrative of the subject, as, for example, the vase mentioned above with the parting scene of Alcestis and Admetus, which has, in addition to the names of the two principal figures, a sentence in the Etruscan language, spoken by Charun— “Eca ersce nac aqrum wlerorce” (I bear thee to Acheron). The names of Admetus and Alcestis are written retrogr ade, thus—

Several Etruscan vases of black ware have been found with the complete Etruscan alphabet rudely scratched upon them. They give early forms of the twenty-two Phoenician letters, and are arranged in the Semitic order. A cup in the museum at Grosseto has two Greek letters added after the twenty-two which composed the Etruscan alphabet. Some late vases, not earlier than about 200 b.c., are interesting from having inscriptions painted in white, which give early forms of the Latin language. They are mostlv dedicatory, with names of Latin deities, e.g., VOLCANI POCVLOM, “the cup of Vulcan”; BELOLAI POCVLOM, “the cup of Bellona,” and others.

Dates of Etruscan Pottery.— These can only be roughly estimated.

The black moulded ware (class 2) seems to range from about the 8th to the 3d century b.c. The large jars with stamped bands (class 4) appear to be all very early in date, about the 8th century b.c. They are not found in those tombs which contain painted vases. The large vessels with rude native paintings (class 3) are probably of the 6th and 7th centuries. The vases with imitations of Greek paintings extend over a long period, from about the 6th to the 2d century B.c.

The greatest quantities of Etruscan pottery have been discovered in the tombs of Tarquinii, Caere, Veii, Cervetri, Chiusi, and near Or-bitello, Volterra, Orvieto, and other places in central Italy, but above all at Vulci. The best collections are in the Louvre and the Vatican, at Florence, Naples, Turin, Bologna, Brescia, and many small towns in Italy in the neighbourhood of the various Etruscan cemeteries, such as Orvieto, Perugia, Grosseto, Volterra, Arezzo, and at Capua, where a very important ceramic museum is being formed.

Literature.— The best articles on the subject of Greek and Etruscan pottery are scattered through the numbers of various archaeological publications, especially the Annali, the Monumenti, and the Bulletino dell’ Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, Rome, 1829, and still in progress. See also the Bulletino Archeologico Napolitano, 1842-59; Stephani, Compte rendu de la Commission Archéologique, fit Petersburg, 1859 (in progress); Bull, de Cor. Hellen., in progress; Archäologische Zeitung, Berlin; Philologus: Zeitschrift für das klassische Alterthum; Rheinisches Museum für Philologie·, Archaeologia, Soc. Ant. London; Berichte der sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften ; Panofka, Antiques du Cabinet Pourtalès, 1834; C. T. Newton, Catalogue of Greek Vases, British Museum, 1851-70; Gerhard, A ntike Bildwerke (1828-44), Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder (1840-58), and Griechische und etruskische Trinkschalen (1840); Benndorf, Griechische und siciliensche Vasenbilder, 1877, in progress (with fine coloured plates, all full size); Helbig, Wandgemälde Campaniens, 1868; Inghirami, Pitture di Vasi fittili, 1832-39; Millingen, Unedited Monuments, London, 1822-26: Lenormant and De Witte, Monuments Céramographiques, 1844-61; Raoul-Rochette, Monuments d'Antiquité Grecque, <fcc., 1833; Lahn, Gemälde aus Pompei, <tc., 1828-59; Bröndsted, Thirty-two Greek Vases, 1832; Fiorelli, Vasi diρinti, &c., 1856; Gargiulo, Vasi fittili Italo-Greci, 1831; Heydemann, Griechische Vasenbilder, 1870, and Die Vasensammlungen des Museo zu Neapel, 1872; Jahn, lieber Darstellungen griechischer Dichter auf Vasenbildern, 1861, and Vasensammlung zu München, 1854; Levezotf, Verzeichniss der antiken Denkmäler, 1834; Stephani, Die Vasensammlung der Ermitage, 1869; De Witte, Vases peints de VÈtrurie, 1837, and Vases peints de la Collection Castellani, 1865; Brunn, Probleme in der Geschichte der Vasenmalerei, 1871; Dumont, Peintures céram. de la Grèce, 1874, and Vases peints de la Grèce, 1873; Dumont and Chaplain, Les Céramiques de la Grèce, Paris, 1883 (in progress, with excellent illustrations); Kekulé, Griech. Vasengemälde im Mus. zu Bonn, 1879; Roulez, Vases du Musée de Leide, Ghent, 1854; Collignon, Cat. des Vases du Mus. d’Athènes, Paris, 1877; Froehner, Anatomie des Vases Grecs, Paris, 1880; Thiersch, Die hellen, bemalten Vasen, Munich, 1848. The following works deal specially with the vases found in Etruria :— Inghirami, Museo Chiusino, Fiesole, 1833, and Mon. Etruschi, 1845; Conestabile, Mon. di Perugia, 1855-70; Noel Desvergers, L’Étrurie, Paris, 1862-64; Bull, degli Scavi d. Soc. columbaria, Florence, in progress; Gozzadini, Necropoli a Marzabotto (1865-70), Sepolcri d. Necropoli Felsinea (1868), Necropoli di Villanova (1870), and Sepolcri nell' Arsenale di Bologna (1875); Zannoni, Scavi d. Certosa di Bologna (1871), Scavi Arnoaldi (1877), and Scavi di via d. Pratello (1873); all these works by Gozzadini and Zannoni are printed at Bologna. See also Pindar, Nemeean Ode, x. 64-67, and Strabo, viii. p. 381. For inscriptions on vases, see Ephemeris Epigraphica, and Bockh, Corp. Iscr. Gr. Section VII.— Graeco-Roman and Roman.

Some specimens of very peculiar glazed pottery have been found at Gyrene, Cyme, Pergamum, Smyrna, Tarsus, and other Roman colonies in Asia Minor. It is very delicate and often graceful in shape (see fig. 39), with very thin handles, fashioned more like glass than pottery. It is remarkable for being covered with a thick vitreous glaze, usually coloured either green, orange, or purple-brown, with oxide of copper, antimoniate of lead, or manganese, quite unlike the thin almost imperceptible glaze of Greek vases. This pottery is mostly small; some pieces are in the shapes of oenochoae, two-handed cups, or asci, the latter covered with graceful patterns of vines or other plants moulded in slight relief. Statuettes and delicate reliefs, parti-coloured with different glazes or enamels, have been found at several of the above places, and also larger vessels, craters, and bottle-shaped vases, decorated with moulded clay emblemata, wholly covered with a fine blue glaze. The Louvre and the British Museum have the best specimens of this rare ware, which probably dates from the 1st century b.c. downwards.

“Samian” ware, the characteristics of which are described below, was made in Italy during the first period of Graeco-Roman art. In 1883 some moulds for cups and bowls were found at Arezzo, all of the most wonderful beauty and gem-like delicacy of execution. The figures on them are from about 3 to 4 inches high, but are large and sculpturesque in their breadth of treatment. Some of the exquisite reliefs represent dancing fauns and bacchanals, with flowing drapery, on a background enriched with vine plants in slight relief. Another has a love scene of extraordinary grace and refined beauty. The modelling of the nude throughout is most masterly. The treatment of these reliefs recalls the school of Praxiteles, though they are probably not earlier than the 1st or 2d century b.c. Roman Pottery, 1st Century b.c. to 5th Century a.d. — Throughout Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries occupied by the Romans great quantities of pottery have been found, varying but little in design or manner of execution. The principal varieties of this large and widely-spread species of ware may be classified thus—(1) Samian ware; (2) plain biscuit clay; (3) pottery decorated with slip in relief; (4) black ware; (5) glazed ware.

1. The first class is a fine glossy red ware called “Samian” from its resemblance to the red pottery produced in the Greek island of Samos. The name is a convenient one, and as it is used by Pliny (7Z. N., xxxv. 46) and other early writers it is well not to discard it, though probably the real Greek Samian pottery bore little resemblance to that made by the Romans except in colour and glossy surface. It is of a fine red sealing-wax-like colour, of pleasant texture, and is generally decorated with moulded reliefs. Materials : the clay body usually consists of silica 50-64 parts, alumina 18-25, red oxide of iron 7-10, and lime 2-9 parts; these proportions vary in different specimens. The red vitreous glaze, or rather enamel, which gives the ware its fine glossy surface consists of silica 64 parts, soda 20, and red oxide of iron 11 (average analysis). Method of manufacture : the bowls, cups, and other vessels, richly decorated outside with reliefs, were made thus. In the case of a bowl, a mould was first prepared, of hard well-burned clay, covered inside with incuse designs; these sunk patterns were made either by hand-modelling or, more usually, with the aid of stamps modelled in relief. Thus the inside of the bowl-mould corresponded to the outside of the future Samian bowl, which was first turned on the wheel quite plain, but of the right size to fit into the mould. Then, while it was still soft it was pressed into the mould, and afterwards both were put upon the wheel together. As the wheel revolved, the potter could at the same time press the clay into the sunk ornaments of the mould and finish neatly the inside of the vessel. In some cases he raised the walls of the bowl high above the mould by adding clay, and thus with the same mould could produce a variety of forms, though the lower or decorated portion always remained the same. A fine crater in the Louvre was made in this way. The vessel was then removed from the mould and the reliefs touched up by hand (in the finer specimens) with bone or wooden modellingtools. The reliefs thus produced are often very graceful in design, but are mostly wanting in sharpness, many being blunted by the touch of the potter’s fingers in handling the pot after it was removed from the mould. It was next covered with the materials for the red enamel, very finely ground and fired in the usual way. Fig. 40 shows a design of typical character. The outer reliefs consist generally of graceful flowing scroll-work of vines, ivy, or other ornaments, mixed occasionally with human figures and animals. The finest sorts of Samian ware were made at Arezzo (Aretium) in Italy and Saguntum in Spain (the modern Murviedro). It was also produced in France and Germany, and the discovery of a Samian bowl-mould at York makes it appear probable that it was made in Britain,where great quantities of it have been found. This ware is of great beauty, both in colour and in its delicate surface reliefs; it is the most artistic sort of pottery that the Romans produced. It appears to have been highly valued, as many Samian bowls have been found carefully mended with bronze or lead rivets. In addition to the moulded ware many vessels of the same class were made plain from the wheel; others have a peculiar scale ornament in relief applied by the potter’s thumb, a form of decoration common in other varieties of Roman pottery.

2. Plain Biscuit Pottery is made of simple unglazed clay, without decoration, of a soft body and quite porous. The clay is mostly composed thus: silica 48-69 per cent., alumina 10-22, oxide of iron 8-13, lime 1⅜-18 per cent., but it, of course, varies according to the locality where the pottery was made. Fig. 41 shows some of the forms of this simple ware. It was specially used for amphorae, often nearly 2 feet high, sepulchral urns, and vessels for common domestic use. The forms are mostly graceful and natural. The clay is of many colours, including all shades of red, grey, brown, yellow, and (rarely) almost pure white. Some of this pottery has the grain which had been produced by the wheel carefully smoothed out by a tool or the potter’s hand, or in some cases by dipping the piece into a bath of thin fluid slip, but it is more commonly left without any attempt at smoothness or high finish.

3. Pottery with Reliefs applied in Slip.— This is a very remarkable kind of decoration, in which great skill was shown by the Roman potters. The slip, finely-ground clay, was mixed with water to about the consistency of very thick cream, and was allowed to run slowly or drop off a wooden point or flat spatula upon the outside of ordinary wheel-made pottery. Very spirited figures of animals (see fig. 42)—hares pursued by dogs, lions, goats, horses, deer, or even complicated subjects with human figures such as gladiators’ combats—and a great variety of graceful scroll-ornaments of vine, ivy, or convolvulus were produced in this -way with wonderful ingenuity. Both the outline and the modelling were given with curious precision by the quantity of semi-fluid slip which was allowed to flow off the tool. The body, e.g., of a dog would be poured off a sort of small palette-knife, and its thinner legs formed by trailing along a point dipped in the slip. Tools for this purpose have been found near Roman kilns. One of the most elaborate specimens of this kind of pottery is a cup in the Colchester Museum, covered with reliefs of chariot-races and gladiators’ combats, done with great vigour and even minuteness of detail considering the difficulties of the process. In some cases, especially when the designs are simple scroll or geometrical ornaments, additional effect is produced by the use of a slip coloured differently from the body of the pot. Frequently the relief-patterns are white, made of pipeclay, applied to a red or dark coloured vessel. The vessels with this class of decoration are mostly small bowls, cups, or bottle-like vases. Some few are made of the Samian ware, but more commonly they are grey or blackish with body and slip both of the same clay. A great deal of coarse Roman pottery is rudely decorated with a thin slip of red, white, or yellow clay, put on with a brush in coarse bands or scroll-patterns. The slip in this case is treated as a pigment of the simplest kind, and does not stand out in relief. With this trifling exception, nothing in the form of painted vases was produced by the potters of Roman times.

4. Black Pottery is usually made from a very silicious or sandy clay, composed thus—(average of several analyses) silica 76 parts, alumina 10, oxide of iron 9, lime 2. It owes its black colour and rather metallic gloss to the direct contact of smoke in a close or smother kiln. If heated in an open fire it burns out usually to a greyish white. A great deal of this ware belongs also to class 3, as it is frequently decorated with simple patterns in white slip; the presence of the white clay on the black body implies a second firing, free from the contact of smoke, and not high enough in temperature to burn the black out of the body of the pot. This ware was largely made at many places in Germany along the Rhine, in France, and especially at Castor in Northamptonshire, where remains of many Roman kilns have been found. It varies very much in shape and in method of decoration. Some of the numerous specimens from Bonn and Rheinzabern are treated in a manner different from the British varieties. A few are coated with a black similar to that used by the Greeks, but very thin and poor in quality. Others have a mechanical polish applied after firing, whilst the pot ·was again set on the wheel, by rubbing it with black lead, occasionally applied in bands of alternately dull and bright black all round the pot. A fine specimen from Coblentz, now in the Sèvres Museum, has a curious combination of stamped work and reliefs formed in fluid slip. The design represents a lion running through vine-branches. The body of the lion and the grapes are stamped from a mould, the rest being done in slip. Cups and small jars of this ware are frequently modelled into strange shapes by being pinched in at various places by the potter’s fingers while they were fresh from the wheel. Others are decorated with groups of dots, made of semi-fluid slip, apparently applied through a pierced stencil-plate (see fig. 43). The dots are arranged in close rows, forming rectangular patches, arranged round the body of the vessel,—a very dull kind of ornament, which may, however, have had a practical use in making the pottery less liable to slip from the holder’s fingers.

5. Glazed Pottery.— This is rare, but has been found in most of the countries once occupied by the Bomans. Some of the best specimens resemble that described above as Graeco-Roman glazed ware. Most are, however, very inferior, both in execution and in the quality of the glaze, which is a true glass, usually coloured light green or brownish yellow. A cake of semi-fused greenish glass, apparently intended for this purpose, was found in the ruins of a kiln in Britain. This glazed pottery is small, and is decorated in various ways, by incised lines, or groups of dots in relief, or by brush-applied stripes of red or white clay.

In addition to the forms of Roman domestic pottery shown in the above figures one peculiar shape occurs very frequently, namely, the “mortarium,” a large shallow dish, made of thick clay, with a spout at one side, used for triturating cooked vegetables or other soft substances. The inside of these mortar-like dishes is often roughened by being sprinkled, while in a soft state, with crushed quartz or pottery, apparently to aid the process of pounding. They are made of various kinds of ware, especially red Samian and yellow biscuit clay.

Clay lamps were very largely used by the Romans, mostly made of plain biscuit clay, but the finest specimens are in the red Samian ware. A few have been found with a thick vitreous glaze, coloured like the rest of the Roman glazed wares (see Lamp, vol. xiv. p. 247).

An extensive use of baked clay was made by the Romans in the manufacture of bricks, roofing-tiles, flue-tiles, drain-pipes, baths, and even coffins. The bricks are generally very large and thin, some 15 to 18 inches long, and only 1⅜ inches thick, and walls were entirely built of them. They were also used to form alternating bands in stone walls, the brick bands usually consisting of from three to five courses. In Rome bricks were merely used as a facing to concrete walls. They are always triangular in shape, except such as were set at the angles of walls and used as facing to arches. Those used for the latter purpose are generally two Roman feet square (about 1 foot 11⅜ inches English). See Rome. The system of heating employed by the Romans in their houses and baths was very ingenious and complete. Sometimes the whole walls of a room were lined with clay flue-pipes, square in section, which, being connected at the bottom with the hypocaust, carried the hot air over the whole wall-surface as well as under the floor (see Bath), the mosaic and concrete area of which (the “suspensura ”) was supported on large clay slabs carried on short brick pillars. Flanged tiles, similar to those used for roofing, were often built up on edge, with others set across the top, to form graves, and to protect the sepulchral urns and other buried objects from being crushed by the weight of earth upon them.

Roman Pottery-kilns. — Great numbers of Roman kilns have been found in various countries, but none quite perfect. They are small, round, or Oval structures of brick, with a place for the fuel at one side, and a floor made of pierced slabs of clay, on which the pots were piled, the flames and hot air passing through the holes in the clay floor. Most kilns were probably covered by a brick dome with a central opening, exactly the same in principle as the early Corinthian kiln shown in fig. 3. The smother kilns may, however, have been arranged rather differently, so as to fire the pots in an atmosphere of heated smoke; or this may have been done by partly closing the aperture at the top, in order to half smother the fire, and prevent its burning with a hot clear flame. Fig. 44 shows the remains of one of the Castor kilns, about 7 feet in diameter, with an arched opening for the insertion of the fuel, and a pierced floor, made of large clay slabs radiating to a central point, where they were supported by a brick pillar. Other kilns have been found in the Upchurch marshes (Kent), along the Severn banks in Shropshire, at Ashdon (Essex), Colchester, London, York, and many other Romano-British towns. Though varying in shape, yet in general principle Roman kilns, in whatever country they are found, are practically the same.

Inscriptions on Roman Pottery.— Potters’ names, impressed from oblong or circular incuse stamps, occur very frequently on many varieties of Roman pottery, especially on the plain biscuit and

Samian wares. Teutonic and Gaulish names sometimes appear, showing that in certain cases native potters worked at the Roman potteries. When the potter’s name is in the nominative, it is followed by F. or FECIT; if in the genitive, by MANV or OFFICINA, usually in some contracted form. In addition to the potter’s name those of the owner of the workshop and of the estate from which the clay came occasionally occur, as, for example, OP(US) DOL(IARE) L. IVLI THEOD(OTI) E(QVITIS) R(OMANI) FIG(LINAE) SAL(ARIAE) EX PR(AEDIS) FL(AVII) TITIANI C. V. (clarissimi viri), “Pot-work from the salariai! manufactory belonging to L. Julius Theodotus, a Roman knight, (the clay taken) from the estate of Flavius Titianus, a most distinguished person,” this last being a title used like the English “esquire.” This brick stamp is from a house built against the ancient wall round the Capitoline hill, and dates from the middle of the 2d century A.n. Few brick stamps found in Rome are older than the end of the 1st century a.i>. ; but some have been found at Yelia in Cisalpine Gaul dated with the names of the consuls for 75 b.c. Others have also the name of the ruling emperor. Roman soldiers were often employed to make bricks and tiles; and many such are stamped with the mark or number of a Roman legion, e.g., LEG. VI. for “legio sexta.” Amphorae were occasionally inscribed, in rudely-painted ochre colours, with words to indicate the quality of wine they contained or their measure of capacity, but such inscriptions were probably added when the amphorae were in their owner’s cellar, and were simply painted in tempera. Numbers of large amphorae were frequently embedded in the concrete of which Roman vaults were made, especially during the 3d and 4th centuries A. d., one object of this being to gain lightness without much loss of strength. The circus of Maxentius and the mausoleum of the empress Helena, both outside the walls of Rome, are examples of this curious use of pottery.

Literature.— Pliny, H. N., xxxv.; Birch, Ancient Pottery, 1873; Jewitt, Ceramic Art of Great Britain, vol. i., 1877; Artis, The Durobrivx of Antoninus, 1828; Church, Corinium Museum, 1871; Cochet, Archéologie céramique, 1860; Roach-Smith, Roman London, 1859; Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, 1861; Marcilly, L’Art céramique en Gaule, 1874; Fabroni, Iasi fittili Aretini, 1841 (Samian ware); Robert, Les figures des poteries rougeâtres antiques, 1865; Shortt, Sylvia antiqua Iscana, 1841. See also many articles in Archeeo-logia, the Archaeological Journal, and other societies’ Proceedings. Section VIII.— Persian and Moslem.

It is convenient to class under this head all the numerous varieties of pottery which were the work of Moslem races. In all this pottery, with the exception of that included under the head “Hispano-Moorish” (see p. 622), there is a great similarity in character of design and in methods of execution, both of which appear to a great extent to have been originated and brought to highest perfection under the Persians, who seem to have inherited, through the Sasanians, much of the skill in manipulating clay and manufacturing enamels and glazes which was possessed by the people of ancient Assyria. The Persians of the I Oth to the 17th century, perfect masters of all the decorative arts to a degree possessed probably by no other race or age, excelled in pottery as in other handicrafts. Their enamels and glazes are made and applied with the greatest skill; their colours are brilliant and yet harmonious; and the patterns painted on their pottery are designed with the most wonderful grace and freedom, together with a perfect sense of the right kind of ornament to use for each special place and material.

Materials used by Persian Potters.— In most cases the clay body of Persian pottery is completely covered either with a white enamel or with slip, and therefore any sort of clay sufficiently plastic for the wheel suited the purpose, whatever its colour. The enamel was much the same as that used by the ancient Assyrians, except that it contained a much larger proportion of oxide of lead, of which there were often three parts to one of oxide of tin and five of silicate of soda. The white slip is silicate of alumina with some alkali. The glaze is either a pure silicate of soda, or has in addition a little oxide of lead to increase its fusibility. The pigments are oxides of cobalt and copper for the blues and greens, manganese for the purples, oxides of copper and iron for the reds, magnetic oxide of iron for the black, and antimony for the yellow; a rich warm orange was produced by a mixture of antimony and red oxide of iron. It is not always possible without actual analysis to tell whether the white ground of Persian pottery is a tin enamel or a glazed slip, especially as in many cases a glaze is applied over the enamel; but this is not a point of great importance, as the decorative treatment of the white ground was in either case much the same.

The following are the chief varieties of Persian pottery.

1. Lustred Ware.— The application of lustre colours requires a special process of firing. The following description applies equally to the other two classes of pottery in which lustre pigments were largely used, namely, Hispano-Moorish and Italian majolica. The special beauty of the lustre depends on the decomposition of a metallic salt, usually silver or copper; the required design was painted in a pigment composed mainly of this salt over the surface of the smooth enamel or glaze after it had been fired. The vessel with the lustre pigments was then fired again in a kiln specially so arranged that the heated gases and smoke should come into contact with the metallic pigments; the minute and heated particles of carbon in the smoke combined with the oxygen of the salt, setting free the metal, which was left, in a finely-divided state, fixed on the surface of the enamel. In this way a beautiful prismatic effect was produced like the colours of mother-of-pearl. The lustre colours when looked at from one point of view are simply various shades of browns and yellows, but when seen at an angle they appear shot with the most brilliant violets, blues, purples, and red. They were used generally, and with best effect, over a white ground (see fig. 45), but also over deep-blue or green enamels. Lustre colours were specially used by the Persians for wall-decoration (see Tiles), but they also used them on both white and blue enamel grounds to ornament hookahbottles, bowls, plates, ewers, and tall rose-water bottles. The lustre is generally used alone, and not, as in the Italian majolica, combined with other non-lustre pigments. Its use is very early in Persia: dated specimens exist of the 10th century; and its manufacture has continued down to the present time, though that now made is of a very inferior quality.

2. Coarse pottery covered with a fine white silicious slip, on which arabesques and other simple patterns are painted in black, the whole then covered by a transparent green glaze. This is a very ancient sort of ware, made in Egypt during the XVIIIth Dynasty and many centuries after by Moslem potters, from the early years of their occupation of Egypt down to a very recent period. To this class belong the “bacini” or large dishes with which some of the 12th-century churches in Pisa and other towns in Italy were decorated. They were built in on the outside walls of the campanili, or used in rows to form friezes. In design and method of execution they have nothing in common with Italian majolica, and the oft-repeated story of their being the models from which the Italians learned to make their majolica appears to be a baseless fable.

3. Sgraffiato Ware.— These are certain large bowls or jars decorated in a peculiar way, being covered first with a coating of white enamel and then with a complete coating of brown or deep-blue enamel. The pattern, usually graceful branches of plants with pointed leaves, is formed by cutting through the upper coloured layer down to the white enamel underneath before firing in the kiln. Thus the design appears in white with a coloured ground. The white is, of course, slightly sunk below the coloured layer. Bowls thus decorated are mostly white inside, with a little simple painting in blue, the sgraffiato or incised work being only on the outside.

4. The next class is the reverse of the incised ware in treatment: the whole vessel is covered with brown or blue enamel, and the design, either arabesques geometrically treated or natural sprays of foliage, is painted over it in white enamel, thickly applied so as to stand out in slight relief. This and the preceding class are usually glazed over the enamels, a common Persian practice, to gain additional richness and brilliance of surface. Somewhat akin to this ware in style is a very beautiful sort of pottery with most graceful and delicate designs touched on with a fine brush over a white enamel ground. The pigments are blue, green, grey, and a very rich orange tending to red, and are all thickly but very delicately put on; these pieces are of extreme beauty both in colours and in design. Tall jars, bottles, bowls, plates, and hookah-jars are the vessels usually decorated in this way. Some of the large plates are perfect marvels of decorative beauty of the most refined and graceful kind.

5. Damascus Ware.— Under this head is generally included a good deal of Persian pottery made at other places besides Damascus, but of similar style and colouring. It is mostly remarkable for the fineness of its white enamel or slip, its rich glaze, and the beauty of the designs and colours. One class is painted wholly in various tints of blue, the design being often regular and treated with some geometrical stiffness. Other sorts have in addition a soft olive green, and purple-brown made of manganese (see fig. 46). One of the finest specimens of the ware is a lamp taken from the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, and now in the possession of Mr Drury Fortnum, F.S.A. (see fig. 47). It is inscribed in large blue letters with pious sayings of Mohammed, and in small black characters round the lower rim, “In the year 956, in the month Jumâdâ Ί-ùla. The painter is the poor, the humble Mustafa.” According to our reckoning this date is June 1549 A.D., the year when the Dome was restored by Sultan Suleiman, who was probably the donor of this beautiful lamp. One class of painted decoration used in Damascus ware has flowers treated in a simple way, yet with much natural beauty, such as the rose, hyacinth, tulip, carnation, and others, arranged on large plates and bowls with the most perfect skill and good taste. The plate shown above (fig. 46) is a good example of this sort of design.

6. Rhodian ware, so called because it was largely manufactured by Oriental potters in the island of Rhodes, is made of rather coarse clay, covered with a fine white silicious slip, on which the decorations are painted, the whole being then covered with a thick glaze formed of silica, oxide of lead, and soda. Its chief characteristic is the use of a fine red pigment, which owes its colour to the red oxide of iron. This pigment was applied in very thick body, so that it stands out in actual relief like drops of sealing-wax. Plates, tall bottles, jars, mugs, and pitchers with handles are the usual forms. They are all decorated with patterns of great beauty and splendour of colour, brilliant blues, greens, and the peculiar red being the chief (see fig. 48). The designs are mostly flowers, exactly the same in drawing and arrangement as those on the last-men-!

tioned sort of Damascus ware. Other more geometrical patterns are also used, but mostly for wall-decoration. The finest specimens of Rhodian ware date from the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries. Other pieces of this pottery, which appear to have been made for European buyers, have coats of arms or human figures, the latter very coarsely executed, and probably later in date than the purely Oriental designs. The town of Lindus, where ruined kilns yet remain, was one of the chief places in Rhodes for the production of this kind of pottery. With other Oriental wares it was imported into western Europe during the 16th century. Some specimens exist with English silver mounts of the time of Elizabeth, very elaborately wrought. It was probably included under the title of “Damas ware,” a name which often occurs in mediaeval inventories, and appears to include many varieties of Oriental pottery, all of which were very highly valued in France, Italy, and England during the long period when the native pottery in those countries was of a very rude description. The South Kensington Museum and the Hôtel Cluny in Paris have the finest collections of this magnificent class of Oriental pottery; some very choice specimens are in the British Museum and the Louvre.

7. Pottery made in Persia under Chinese Influence.— This includes several varieties more or less strongly Chinese in method of execution or in design. It is recorded that Shâh 'Abbâs I., a great patron of all the arts, about the year 1600, invited a number of Chinese potters to establish themselves at Ispahan for the sake of introducing improvements in the manufacture of pottery. Though no hard porcelain like that of China appears to have been made in Persia, several new methods of work were introduced, and a new style of decoration, half-Chinese and half-Persian, was largely used for a long period after the arrival of the Chinese potters

The main varieties of this Perso-Chinese ware are the following. (1) A sort of semi-porcelain, called by English dealers, quite without reason, “Gombroon ware,” which is pure white and semi-transparent, but, unlike Chinese porcelain, is soft and friable where not protected by the glaze. It is composed of silicate of alumina, with free silica, and an alkaline flux; in the heat of an ordinary porcelain furnace it fuses into a transparent glass. It is very fragile, but is of an extremely pleasant texture and slightly creamy tint. It is frequently decorated with simple patterns pierced through the sides of the vessel; the holes are filled up by the transparent glaze which covers the whole, thus forming, as it were, little windows of clear glass. It is also often decorated with painted flowers or arabesques in cobalt blue and manganese purple. The forms of the ware are small and delicate, mostly cups, plates, bowls, and flower-vases with many necks; these were made from the 17th down to the 19th century. (2) Celadon, very like that made in China, but greyer in tint, is common earthenware covered with a green enamel.’ It was much valued by the Persians and other nations on account of the belief that a cup of this ware betrayed the presence of poison either by breaking or by changing colour. The Persians call it “jachmi” (jade), from its resemblance to that valuable stone. (3) Pottery of coarse clay, modelled with blunt reliefs, and the whole covered with green enamel. Another variety is covered with a bright blue enamel, chiefly used for ewers, hookah-bottles, and tall jars. Tire moulded reliefs are either flowers or human figures, poor both in design and execution. This kind of decoration was much used for heavy square bottles or tall jars; it has little or no trace of the usual Persian tastefulness of design, and the colour is harsh. Most of this ware is not older than the 18th and 19th centuries. It is very largely Chinese in style. (4) Pottery painted in cobalt blues on a white ground, with some black, used chiefly for outlines. This is the largest class of Perso-Chinese pottery, and of it were made large dishes, bowls, bottles, ewers, and almost all forms of domestic and ornamental vessels. In some the design is purely Persian, in others almost purely Chinese, while in others the two styles are mingled. The Chinese grotesque dragons and mannered treatment of fir trees and even human figures frequently occur, but the more graceful designs have flowers and foliage arranged with that great decorative skill and good taste for which the Persians are so remarkable. Fig. 49 shows a dish from the South Kensington Museum in which there is little or no Chinese influence in the design; it is painted only in blues, and dates from the 17th century. Some few pieces have figures and flowers moulded in low relief, merely indicating the form, and then painted in blues and black lines. On the whole this class of pottery is very decorative in effect; the glaze is thick, and the blues frequently softened by having run a little in the firing; the different shades of blue are very varied and harmonious, ranging from indigo to a deep ultramarine.

Hispano-Moorish Pottery, and Enamelled Lustre Wares produced under Oriental Influence in Sicily and the Balearic Isles.— To the earlier or Arab period of Oriental rule in south-west Europe no existing specimens of pottery can be attributed, though there are sufficient records to show that the Arab potters of Spain, as of other parts of the world, were highly distinguished for their skill and the artistic beauty of their wares. The existing specimens of Hispano-Moorish pottery, which are very numerous, date from the early years of the Moorish occupation, towards the end of the 13th century, and continue down to the 17th century. During this long period three stages were passed through, each with characteristics of its own, but passing imperceptibly one into another,—(1) pottery made by the Moors for their own use; (2) pottery made by them for the use of their Christian conquerors; (3) pottery made by Spanish potters who imitated the technical methods of the Moors, and to some extent their designs and style of decoration.

Technical Methods, Colours, <fr.—The technical methods remained the same throughout all three periods. The process was this. After the pot had been thrown on the wheel, a rather coarse red or yellowish clay being used, it was dipped into a cream-like mixture of the materials for its white enamel coat. This, like the white enamel of Persian pottery, was simply a glass rendered white and opaque by the addition of oxide of tin. When fired, the vessel was covered with a smooth coat of enamel, slightly creamy in colour and very pleasant in texture. Only two colours were used for decoration, and very often only one. The chief of these was a lustre, made with oxides of copper or silver, and varying in tint from a pale lemon yellow to a deep coppery red. The peculiar application of lustre-colour has been described above under the head of “lustred ware” (p. 620). The other colour is a deep indigo blue, varying in tint, and produced sometimes with copper and sometimes with cobalt oxides. The blue was applied before the lustre, which always required a special and final firing under different conditions from those necessary for the fusion of the white enamel and the blue pigment. The chief towns in which the ware was manufactured were Malaga, Valencia, and Manises (in the province of Valencia); the celebrated amphora-shaped vase found in the Alhambra was probably from the first of these places. Ibn Batuta (14th century) describes the beauty of the “gold-coloured pottery” of Malaga, and says that it was largely exported into distant countries. Marineo (Cosas memorabies de Espana, 1517) and Ercolano (Historia de Valencia, 1610) both praise highly the “gilt pottery” made at Valencia and Manises. The term “gilt” refers to the metallic golden colour of the lustre. Pieces of Valencia ware occur with the accompanying mark (No. 1). The usual forms of this pottery chiefly consist of deep dishes and bowls, jars, drug-pots, goblets, and large bucket-shaped vessels. The early ones, such as the Alhambra amphora, dating from the early part of the 14th century, are decorated with delicate and graceful arabesque patterns, or branches of a plant like the briony, the leaves of which are often alternately in blue and in yellow lustre. A few have Arabic inscriptions. The designs are most masterly, drawn with great freedom of touch, and very decorative in effect. The delicacy and minuteness of the painting are often increased by white lines on the yellow lustre, done with a wooden point by wiping out the lines through the lustre pigment before it was fired; this could be done easily, because the lustre was painted on the hard smooth enamel after it was fired, not on an absorbent biscuit surface.

The pottery of the earlier period has mostly a lustre of pale almost lemon yellow made with oxide of silver, while the later and coarser varieties have a deep-red lustre made from copper, which is rather harsh and too metallic in appearance. The decorations of the second period are very frequently heraldic in character. A favourite design for large dishes is a lion rampant or a displayed eagle, the latter used as the emblem of St John the Evangelist, the patron saint of Valencia; others have shields with the arms of Castile and Aragon or of royal personages. Many of the grandly-decorated dishes are not only ornamented on the front but also have their backs elaborately covered with rich and graceful arabesques. Some of this ware is moulded in slight relief; plates have slightly projecting ribs, and goblet-shaped cups have swelling gadroons, a form copied from metal originals. Fig. 50 shows a fine dish, now in the British Museum, painted in copper lustre and blue; though Moorish in style, it has a Spanish inscription, SENTA CATALINA GVARDA NOS. The pottery of the third class is very inferior in all respects to the work of the Moorish potters. Not only is the lustre harsh in quality but the designs are very coarse and often rudely executed, though still for the most part retaining strong traces of their Oriental origin. The mark appended (No. 2) is attributed to the manufactory of Manises, which was very productive in the 17th century.

In addition to the lustred pottery of this sort made in Spain ware of similar design and execution was produced in the Balearic Islands. Many pieces exist bearing the arms of Inca in Majorca. The beauty of Balearic pottery is mentioned by Giovanni da Uzzano, who wrote a treatise on trade and navigation in 1442. It was also alluded to by J. C. Scaliger {Exercitationes, xcii.) in the 16th century. This pottery was largely imported into Italy, where it no doubt influenced the design of some of the so-called “majolica,” though it can hardly have originated its manufacture, as has so often been asserted.

Another class of pottery has been attributed to the

Moslem conquerors of Sicily, though without much distinct evidence. It is very similar to the Hispano-Moorish ware, except that the lustre is painted over a ground of blue not white enamel. Some other pottery, with paintings in blue with black outlines, on a white silicious slip, and covered by a thick vitreous glaze, may be the work of Siculo-Moorish potters. The designs are very bold and effective, often with inscriptions in large Arabic characters, or grotesque horses and other animals, boldly drawn. The attribution of Moslem pottery to special localities is always difficult and uncertain, owing to the great similarity in design and in methods of execution that is always common to Moslem races wherever they may have chanced to settle.

The Kensington Museum and the Hôtel Cluny have the best collections of Persian and Hispano-Moorish wares. The British Museum, the Louvre, and the Archaeological Museum of Madrid have many very choice specimens. Others are scattered through the various museums of Europe.

In other parts of the world, especially among the Moslem people of India, Persia, and northern Africa, very graceful pottery is now made, especially the plain biscuit varieties, in accordance with traditional forms and methods. The common pottery of Egypt is very beautiful in shape and often pleasant in colour and texture; at several places on the banks of the Nile a fine red ware, very like the Roman “Samian,” is still largely manufactured, and the waterjars made of the common brown clay are generally fashioned in shapes of almost Hellenic beauty, which seem to have been continually used since the time of the Ptolemies.

Literature.— For the subject of the preceding section the reader may consult Chardin, Voyages en Perse, c. 1650 (printed in 1811); Rochechouart, Souvenirs d’un Voyage en Perse, 1867; Henderson, Collection of Pottery, &c., 1868; Fortnum, South Kensington Museum Catalogue of Pottery, 1873; Davillier, Les Faiences Hispano-Moresques, 1861; and many works on the general history of pottery.

Section IX.— Teutonic, Saxon, and Gaulish.

Great quantities of sepulchral urns have been found dating from the departure of the Romans from Britain to the 10th century, but almost no specimens exist of the domestic pottery of this period. The shapes, the character of the clay, and the ornamental patterns on the cinerary urns are very much the same whether they are found in Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, or France: they mostly show traces of Roman influence; some are even coarsely-executed copies of red Samian ware, and are skilfully wheel-made and well fired. Others are very rude, hand-made, and scarcely to be distinguished from the pottery of the early iron age. In the main, however, the urns are much neater, more glossy, and more elaborately ornamented than the prehistoric pottery. They are made of hard well-burned clay, generally grey, brown, or blackish in colour. The decoration is often very elaborate, with incised lines, some arranged in wavy bands, others in wheel-made rings. The most characteristic ornaments are simple geometrical patterns, stars, crosses, the svastika, and others, impressed in the soft clay from wooden stamps (see fig. 51).

Many urns have a ring of bosses pressed out from the inside by the potter’s thumb, and some few have bands or stripes in coarse ochre colours or white. The surface of the urns is frequently glossy, partly from the hard silicious quality of the clay, but often because it has been mechanically polished. A black shining surface was sometimes given with graphite (plumbago), as was the case with some of the Roman black pottery. A lump of graphite was found with blackened urns in a tomb at Hogelberg. Mediaeval Pottery of England and France, 11th to 15th Century.— Though great quantities of pottery for domestic use were made during this period it was extremely fragile, and, being of very coarse ware, without artistic beauty, few specimens have been preserved to our times. It consisted mostly of tall jugs, globular pitchers, bowls, dishes, and drinking-cups, all of which were made for some centuries with but little variation in shape or quality. Fig. 52 shows a selection of common forms, usually made of coarse red or yellow clay, often covered with white slip, and partly glazed with a green or yellow vitreous glaze, rendered more fusible by the presence of a large proportion of oxide of lead. Some have coarse painted stripes in coloured ochres; others have heraldic badges or fanciful ornaments, rudely modelled, and fastened to the body of the pot; and some grotesque jugs are formed in the shape of animals or knights on horseback. The most graceful in shape were pilgrim-bottles, flattened globes, very like one of the forms common in Egyptian and Assyrian pottery. The common domestic pottery of the Middle Ages was made and used in enormous quantities. Though it was wonderfully cheap, yet the ease with which it was broken made it a serious and often-recurring item in the household expenses of rich or royal personages. The list of expenses of a feast on the anniversary of Queen Eleanor’s death (wife of Edward I.) contains this item, u p r0 ^ lβ et D discis, tot platellis, tot salseriis, et CCCC chiphis xliis,”—that is, 42s. for 1500 dishes, 1500 plates, 1500 saucers, and 400 cups. The 42s. are perhaps equal to £25 of modern money, a small sum for 4900 pieces of pottery.

Section X.— Mediaeval and Modern Italian. Sgraffiato JJ r are was made by covering a vessel of red clay with a coating of white slip made of some natural white earth like pipeclay. This was done by dipping or by pouring the fluid slip over the red vessel. When the white coating was dry the design was formed by cutting it away so as to expose the red body underneath. In this way bowls, dishes, ewers, and other vessels were decorated with human figures, or with graceful scroll-patterns of foliage and flowers. The patterns were then picked out with bright colours,—yellow, blue, and green; and finally the whole was glazed with a very fusible lead glaze (see fig. 53). This is probably a very early method for the decoration of pottery in various parts of Italy; but only few existing specimens are older than the second half of the 15th century. Some of the earlier specimens have very graceful designs, of almost Gothic style, executed with great spirit, and very decorative in effect. Sgraffiato ware continued to be made during the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in the neighbourhood of Pavia; it was, however, but little esteemed owing to the greater popularity of painted majolica. Rude imitations of it were made in Germany and France.

Italian Majolica. — The history of this ware in its early stages of development is almost unknown. According to popular tradition, it was first copied from certain plates brought by the Pisans from the island of Majolica (or Majorca) in the 12th century. This is extremely improbable; the fabrication and use of a white tin enamel were known to Italian potters long before they found out the secret of lustre colours, a discovery not made in Italy till the 15th century. We know from various sources that lustred pottery from the Balearic Islands was largely imported into Italy during the 15th century (see above), and it is quite possible that the sight of the brilliant lustre on the imported Moorish ware set the potters of Italy to work, and led them to find out, either by experiments or from some traveller who had visited the Balearic kilns, how to compose and fire the metallic salts required to produce the lustre; but this occurred long after the Pisan victory at Majorca. It was to the lustred ware only that the Italians gave the name of “majolica,” though now it is commonly applied to all the Italian enamelled pottery of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was the lustre only that was a fresh discovery in the 15th century; enamelled ware had been made by Italian potters many years before. This is an important point, and it should be noted that the accounts given by Vasari and several other old Italian writers on the subject are quite misleading. “Mezza-majolica” is a word of rather uncertain meaning which occurs in early writers on Italian pottery. It has been used to mean pottery covered not with a tin enamel but with a white slip, made of a white clay like that found at Vicenza; and in many museums the earlier and ruder sorts of majolica have been arranged under this name. The fact, however, seems to be that even the rudest and earliest specimens of majolica in the various museums of Europe are covered with a true tin enamel. Curious specimens of pottery, covered with a rude enamel made of the white kaolinic ii terra di Vicenza” mixed with an alkaline silicate, have recently been found in tombs of the 11th and 12th centuries in various parts of Italy. These earliest attempts at what we now call majolica are coarsely decorated in green, yellow, and blue, on a white ground, with patterns of semi-Oriental style. The pigments used appear in some cases to be simply coloured glass reduced to powder,—a kind of smalto. This style of pottery is probably the mezza-majolica of Vasari. It is evidently the first step towards the production of the true majolica, in which the kaolinic clay of Vicenza is replaced by a tin enamel. This discovery is of great importance as regards the early history of Italian pottery. The few pieces yet known are mostly preserved in the office of public instruction in Rome, and are not yet exhibited in any museum.

Very few early examples of developed Italian majolica are now known. One of the most important is a small jug, 5 inches high, in the Sèvres Museum, which is made of reddish clay covered with a white tin enamel, and painted with a shield and simple ornaments in manganese purple and bright green (oxide of copper). It is supposed to have been made at Rimini, and dates from the 13th or 14th century (see fig. 54). It was not, however, till the second half of the 15th century that Italian majolica began to be largely produced.

Owing to the great difficulty of determining the special towns where the earlier varieties were made, it will be convenient to treat this ware according to style and date rather than under the heads of the different potteries. During the earlier and more important period the production of majolica was confined to a very small part of Italy. Bologna on the north, Perugia on the south, Siena on the west, and the Adriatic on the east roughly indicate the limits within which the chief majolica-producing towns were situated; these were Forli, Faenza, Rimini, Cafaggiolo, Pesaro, Urbino, Castel Durante, Gubbio, Γerugia, and Siena. Towards the middle of the 16th century distant cities such as Venice also produced fine majolica, but of the later style.

Materials.— Fortunately ample information on this subject has been preserved to us. A potter of Castel Durante occupied himself for some time in writing a full description of the materials, the methods of using them, the “throwingwheels,” the kilns, and all the varied processes of his craft. His original MS., copiously illustrated with clever pensketches, is in the library of the South Kensington Museum, and the work was printed, with facsimiles of the drawings, at Pesaro in 1879. It is called I tre libri dell , arte del Vasajo by Cipriano Piccolpasso of Castel Durante, and is dated 1548.

Piccolpasso himself did not produce lustred ware, but he describes the process and the special kiln it required; his description of materials and methods, though not written till 1548, applies in all important points to the majolica of the second half of the previous century. Various receipts differing in the proportions of their ingredients are given; the following examples are selected as typical instances.

1. The clay body, “terra,” was to be, if possible, clay deposited by a river. It was carefully prepared for use by being beaten, ground in a mill, and passed through a sieve, so as to bring it into a smooth homogeneous plastic state, fit for being moulded on the wheel. It was all the better for being dug out a long time before it was used.

2. The white enamel, “bianco,” was composed of thirty parts of “marzacotto” to twelve of oxide of tin. The marzacotto was simple powdered glass, a pure silicate of potash, made from clean sand and the alkaline tartar deposited by wine. According to Piccolpasso the decorations were painted on the enamel ground sometimes before it was fired, and sometimes after. This was an important difference. The enamel before firing formed a slightly granular and very absorbent ground, like clay in the biscuit state; and the paintings on it had to be bold and broadly decorative, not delicate and miniature-like; the touch of the brush had to be rapid and certain; little or no alteration could be made, as the unfired enamel sucked the pigment out of the brush and absorbed it below the surface. The earlier and more boldly decorative sorts of majolica appear to have been painted in this way on the unfired enamel, and owe much of their richness of effect to the fact that the different pigments have sunk below the surface of the ground. This process may be compared to that of painting in true fresco, while the painting on the fired enamel resembles the more deliberate method of the painter in oil. After passing through the kiln the whole character of the enamel was completely changed; it formed then a hard, smooth, non-absorbent, vitreous surface, on which the finest lines and the most minute paintings could be executed, and any part of it could easily be altered or wiped out. It was in great part owing to this change of method that the later majolica paintings became more pictorial and more minute in execution, the almost inevitable result of painting on a hard glassy ground. In some instances it is not easy to decide which method of painting has been adopted, though in most cases there is a distinct difference in the quality of the lines. One peculiarity is a sure test: when delicate patterns in white have been formed by covering the enamel ground with some colour, and then wiping out the pattern by using a pointed piece of stick or ivory on thé soft pigment, in that case the enamel certainly was fired first. The colour could not be wiped cleanly out from an absorbent biscuit surface. Much of the delicate beauty of the Persian lustre paintings, especially those on wall-tiles, is due to this method of getting minute patterns in white. It was also, practised, though in a much more limited way, on some of the Italian majolica. The difference of handling between “under-glaze” and “over-glaze” painting corresponds exactly to that of the unfired and fired enamel; but in the latter case another important difference is introduced: underglaze pigments require much greater heat than those over the glaze and are consequently very limited in range of colour, while in majolica painting the same pigments were used in either case.

3. The glaze, “coperta,” an ordinary glass, made more fusible by the presence of lead, consisted of oxide of lead 17 parts, silica (sand) 20, alkali 12, and common salt 8 parts.

4. Pigments, “colori,” all owe their colour to a metallic oxide, yellow being derived from oxides of iron and antimony, green from oxides of copper and antimony, blue from oxide of copper, red from Spanish oxide of iron, Armenian bole, and red ochre, and black from black oxide of copper and manganese. Most of these had a certain proportion of oxide of lead, not to affect the colour but to make them more fusible. Other tints were produced by combinations of these pigments, and different gradations of tone were obtained by adding more or less of the ingredients of the white enamel.

Methods of Manufacture.— Piccolpasso gives sketches of the potters at work throwing vessels on the wheel. The wheel itself: (“torno”) consists of a vertical axle, with a large lower wooden 1 disk for the potter’s foot to keep it revolving, and a smaller upper disk on which the clay was moulded by the potter’s hands,—an apparatus which differs in no respect from that used in Egypt under the Ptolemies, and is still employed in the great porcelain factory at Sèvres. The potter to the right of fig. 55 is working with a wheel like that drawn by Piccolpasso. The earlier kind of majolica is almost wholly wheel-moulded, but during the 16th century a good many plates and vases were formed after shapes copied from silver-work, with sunk bosses or gadroons. These were formed by pressing thin disks of soft clay into moulds made of plaster ( “gesso ”), bone-ash, and pounded marble. An elaborate description of the method is given in Piccolpasso’s MS. Another practice also had arisen in his time, that of finishing the pottery on a joiner’s lathe when it was dry, but before it was enamelled or fired,—a practice unfortunately common at the present day, which makes the form of the vessel more mathematically correct, but greatly injures the freedom and spirit of touch given by the potter’s hand. After the pottery was brought to the required shape it was dipped into a bath of the materials for the white enamel, finely ground and mixed with water; and, after being allowed to dry, it was fired for the first time. The painted decoration was applied on the white enamel with brushes of various sizes, and the vessel was then dipped into a second bath of the glaze materials, finely ground and mixed with water like the enamel. It was afterwards fired a second time. If it had lustre colours, they were put on over the glaze, and a third firing in a different kiln was necessary for the reasons explained above under the head of “Persian pottery.” The application of the transparent glaze over the enamel was not absolutely necessary, and was occasionally omitted, but the finer sorts of majolica usually had it for the sake of the increased brilliance which it gave to the non-lustre colours. The kiln for the ordinary colours and first two firings, as drawn by Piccolpasso, is exactly the same in principle as that used by the potters of ancient Greece and Rome,—that is, an arched chamber in two stories, with a perforated floor between—the lower compartment for the fire, the upper for the pottery. A sketch is also given in Piccolpasso’s MS. of the lustre-kiln, in which the pottery is enveloped in flames and heated smoke. Fig. 55, from a Venetian woodcut of the middle of the 16th century, shows majolica potters at work throwing pots on the wheel. Two different wheels are being used; the man on the left keeps his going by giving it a succession of spins with one hand, the other works his wheel by the help of a lower foot-turned disk. To the extreme left a small kiln is shown; the lower arched opening is for the insertion of the fuel, the upper for the pottery; the holes at the top are for the escape of the heated air and smoke.

Styles of Decoration.—In general character the painted •decoration on the majolica of the latter part of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century is very different from that of a few years later. The first retains much of mediaeval purity and simplicity of design, while the later sort follows the richer and more florid style brought into fashion by the rapidly-approaching decadence of art. The principal variety of the early class is the ware painted in blues with a yellow lustre, manufactured chiefly in the workshops of Pesaro, Gubbio, and Deruta. With these two simple colours effects of the greatest decorative beauty were produced, far more truly artistic and suited to their special purpose than the elaborate pictures in many colours painted some years later in the workshops of Urbino and Durante. In the firm precision of the drawing and extreme skilfulness of touch in the blue outlines one is reminded of the paintings on Greek vases of the best period. Some of the large plates of this ware have ligure-subjects, usually sacred scenes. A very beautiful one in the Louvre has a Madonna and Child enthroned, drawn and composed with the simple grace of Raphael’s early manner. Most, however, have portraits of ladies drawn in profile, the background filled up with simple flowers, and an inscribed scroll, often with the lady’s name and the word “bella” or “diva,” or with epigrammatic mottoes (see fig. 56). The design is first drawn in blue outline, with a little delicate blue shading over the white flesh and a blue edging on the ground round the outline. The dress and the ornaments on the ground and rim of the plate were finally filled in with the yellow lustre, which was sufficiently transparent to let all the blue line details over which it was painted show through. Another rarer sort of early majolica, similar in style, has a deep ruby lustre, employed instead of the golden yellow. Fig. 57 shows a fine example of it, probably produced at Gubbio, which had almost a monopoly of this special lustre, afterwards used so largely in the workshop of Maestro Giorgio. Other early varieties of majolica, painted in a simple and unpictorial way, have no lustre colours, but are remarkable for their brilliant and rather harsh green, with a good deal of manganese purple. Plates of this sort with female portraits, not generally in profile, and heraldic animals, frequently occur, as well as slabs or plaques intended for wall-decoration. Faenza and Forli appear to have been the chief places for their production. The Cluny Museum is very rich in specimens. Cafaggiolo and Faenza also produced, during the early period, some very beautiful and highly-decorative plates, painted without lustre, but with a variety of colours arranged with a most complete harmony of tint. Some have patterns ingeniously devised after a motive suggested by peacocks’ feathers (see fig. 58). The chief colours are yellow and orange, various blues, and occasionally a rich deep red. Amatory plates (“amatorii”), with ladies’ portraits, are also painted in this way, with more elaboration and detail but not greater decorative beauty than the simple blue and yellow lustre of the early Pesaro and Gubbio ware. Specimens of the later Cafaggiolo ware bear the accompanying mark (see No. 3). Forli was one of the earliest towns to produce a fine class of majolica; specimens exist dated 1470, of very noble design and firm outline. A fine set of plates and vases was made there (c. 1480-85) for Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary. The flesh of the figures, like that on the early Pesaro and Deruta ware, is white, delicately shaded with blue; but the early Forli potters used a greater variety of colours than were employed at most other towns: in addition to the blues they had yellow, bright green, and purple-brown, all non-lustre colours. To Forli or Faenza must be attributed a very curious and rudely painted plate in the Sèvres Museum, decorated with a youth on horseback in blue outline; it has a date which appears to read 1448; if so, this is the earliest dated specimen of majolica. The enamel is coarse and crackled all over, but the method of execution is that of true majolica.

Majolica of Maestro Giorgio Andreoli of Gv,bbio.— The workshop of this artist, most of whose dated works fall between 1517 and 1537, was one of the largest and most important of his time. Its productions, as well as those with the signature “Μ? G? da Ugubio,” or as in No. 4, are very unequal in merit, and even the best of them are very inferior as specimens of true decorative art Compared with the majolica of the earlier classes described above.

The mark used most frequently by Giorgio is shown in No. 5. A somewhat similar monogram was used by an earlier potter; an example dated 1491 is shown in No. 6. Though not the inventor of the ruby lustre, which was then so much admired, Giorgio appears to have been the chief potter of his time who used it. The fact is, the process was a difficult one and required special skill, not in the preparation of the oxide of copper pigment but in the firing, so as to expose the colour to actual contact with the reducing flame without the pottery itself being shattered to pieces. Even with the best skill of the Gubbio potters a large proportion of the lustred ware perished in the kiln. The majolica potters of many other towns were in the habit of sending their otherwise finished wares to Gubbio for the sake of having the additional brilliance derived from lustre colours. In some cases a space for the lustres was left white; in others rude dabs and splashes of ruby and yellow lustre were applied over completely finished paintings of landscapes or figure-subjects, often in a very coarse and tasteless fashion. Some delicately painted plates are quite spoiled and vulgarized by the heavy touches of lustre that have been put over them. The ruby is in fact rather strong and hard in tone, and needed very careful application to make it harmonize with the quieter non-lustre colours; it is far more salient and metallic-looking than the fine yellow lustre of the early ware. In addition to the ruby, “gold” and “silver” lustres were used at Gubbio. The latter are a deep and a pale yellow. The pale silver lustre was made from oxide of silver; the gold was a mixture of copper and silver oxides. A great deal of the produce of Giorgio’s workshop is very rude and of no artistic merit, while the best and most carefully painted wares usually err, in accordance with the rapidly declining taste of his time, in being far too pictorial. Copies of pictures crowded with figures, arranged without regard to the shape of the vessel they were meant to decorate, and painted with all the colours of the potter’s palette, were most highly esteemed. Many of them are from designs by Raphael and other great painters, but are really quite unsuited for ceramic decoration. Giorgio’s earlier works are, on the whole, in better taste, and some later portrait heads are very good. Fig. 59 shows a fine tazza in the Louvre signed at the back “ex o. Giorg√ , which is both nobly drawn and harmonious in colour; itsdate isabout 1525. The favourite subjects on the pictured (“istoriata”) majolica of Gubbio and elsewhere are scenes from Roman mythology, especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and stories from classical his tory. Unluckily contemporary history is rare; the British Museum has a good specimen, a plate painted with the defeat of Francis I. at the battle of Pavia.

It was at Urbino and Castel Durante that the production of elaborate pictured majolica was mostly carried on, especially between the years 1530 and 1560, under the patronage of the reigning dukes of the Della Rovere family. Francesco Xanto Avelli, Guido Fontana, and Niccola da Urbino were specially celebrated for this class of work, and often used Marc Antonio Raimondi’s engravings from Raphael’s designs to decorate their plates and vases. Many of these are painted with great delicacy and richness of effect in spite of their unsuitability for their special purpose and the comparative poverty of the potter’s palette, which was, of course, limited to colours that would stand the severe heat of the kiln. The pictured wares of Urbino sometimes have the Gubbio lustre colours, but the best are without them. Another class of design was also used at Urbino with much better decorative effect. It consisted of fanciful and graceful arabesques or floral scrollwork mingled with grotesque figures or Cupids, all skilfully arranged to emphasize the main contours of the plate or vase. Branches of the oak tree in flowing and slightly geometrical lines are a frequent motive of design, chosen in compliment to the Della Rovere dukes, who bore an oak on their coat of arms. All these, but especially the pictured wares, were highly paid for, and sometimes were valued as much as silver plate. They were mostly

“piatti di pompa,”—meant, that is, to hang on walls or ornament sideboards rather than for actual use. Some of the early productions of one of the Urbino potteries are marked with the graceful monogram No. 7.

In a short sketch like this it is impossible to give even an outline of the many varieties of majolica produced in such profusion during the 16th century, but a few others of the more important kinds may be mentioned. The Faenza potteries produced one of the most beautiful of the later varieties, chiefly plates with wide flat rims and deep centres, called “tondini,” the borders decorated with delicate and minute arabesques, painted in several tints of a deep ultramarine blue of wonderful richness and decorative effect. In the centre is usually a coat of arms or a single figure, with a brilliant jewel-like touch of orange or deep red, which sets off to the utmost the blues of the border (see fig. 60). One of the most remarkable specimens of majolica painting, treated with the delicate minuteness of an illuminated MS., is on a plate in the British Museum from the Faenza workshops. It is a scene of the death of the Virgin, surrounded by the apostles, copied with slight adaptations from an engraving by the German master Martin Schongauer. The

Italian ceramic painter has slightly but skilfully altered the composition to fit it to the circular form of the plate, and has also given a more graceful cast to the mannered German faces of the original. The execution is wonderfully delicate and miniaturelike, almost wholly done in different tints of blue, with a little yellow to suggest flesh colour, and high lights touched in with pure white enamel, the main enamel ground being white slightly tinged with pink. It is evi-dentlv the work of a verv able artist, and is a little picture of gem-like beauty, though in no way specially suited to the requirements of ceramic art, for which a bolder and less realistic style of treatment is really the most suitable.

Some fine early plates of Faenza make are signed with No. 8 mark; a common later mark is the monogram FA(enza)—see No. 9. Another plate, also in the British Museum, has a painting copied from a design by Albert Durer, the Scourging of Christ. This highly - laboured and minute style of painting was largely practised in the potteries of Siena, which produced plates of great beauty, with borders of graceful scroll-work and grotesques in white and different tints of blue, with usually a rich russet-brown or orange ground. Tondini from Siena are often decorated in this way with a central medallion containing a minute landscape, painted with wonderful minuteness and finish. The landscapes are very delicate in colour, and, though often not more than an inch and a half in diameter, have a wonderful suggestion of atmosphere and distance which recalls the lovely sunset-lit backgrounds of Perugino’s pictures. A very beautiful plate in the British Museum, painted in this minute style with the scene of Scaevola before Porsena, is signed on the back, “fata i Siena da Μ? Benedetto.” Other plates by the same very clever and refined painter are decorated only in blue, with touches of pure white on the creamy enamel ground. The Kensington Museum has a good specimen, with a central painting of a hermit and landscape background, surrounded by a delicate border of arabesques. Little is known of the artist. Another signature which occurs on Siena ware is No. 10, in one case conjoined with the date 1542. Majolica with plain blue enamel is a rare variety, and has been attributed to Luca or Andrea della Robbia, some pieces being marked as in No. 11, apparently for “Luca della Robbia, Florentia.” It has no painting, but was partly gilt; in colour the enamel resembles the plain blue pottery of Persia mentioned above. It consists mostly of vases moulded with flutings and bosses after a metal design; very few pieces exist. The beautiful sculpture in enamelled terra-cotta made by the Della Robbia family will be treated of under the head of Robbia.

Venetian majolica was not largely produced till towards the second half of the 16th century. In the earlier part of that century the few potters of Venice appear to have chiefly occupied themselves with attempts to produce true porcelain. The earliest dated specimen of Venetian majolica is of the year 1540. Some of this ware is veιy decorative in effect, and has paintings of graceful and elaborate foliage, scroll-work, and arabesques, designed with great intricacy. It is in blue and white, the main enamel ground being a very pale blue, and the design in deeper shades of blue with high lights in pure white. Others have landscapes in blue and white, with graceful, but too realistic borders of fruit and flowers in yellow, green, and blue, somewhat later in style. Mark No. 12 occurs on some of the finest Venetian majolica. Towards the end of the 16th century there was a rapid falling off in the artistic beauty of majolica paintings, and not solely in the execution: the pigments also became thin and poor, with very often a disagreeable “granular” look. Some effective pottery was produced at Venice, c. 1590-1620, with a deep ultramarine blue enamel ground, on which designs were painted in white, a style of ware which was largely manufactured at Nevers in France a few years later (see fig. 62 below).

All through the 17th and 18th centuries majolica in a degraded form was produced at many places in Italy; but most of the old kilns, such as those of Deruta, Gubbio, and Faenza, fell into disuse. The latest kind of majolica, decorated with coarse paintings in blues and yellows of rather harsh tint, was largely produced at Turin, Genoa, Venice, Savona, Castello, Naples, Montelupo, and other cities. The older potteries at Pesaro and Urbino still continued in work, but produced nothing of real merit. A common mark on Turin ware is No. 13; and on Savona majolica one of the two forms in No. 14 often occurs. In the beginning of the 17th century spirited copies were made of the magnificent Rhodian pottery, such as that shown in fig. 48 above, but with pigments very inferior to those of the originals. At Capo di Monte, near Naples, a manufactory of pottery and porcelain was started under royal patronage in 1736; but it was more celebrated for the production of porcelain than of enamelled wares. Of late years clever imitations of the old majolica have been produced in Italy, especially from the workshop of the marquis Ginori. Even the old lustre colours are successfully reproduced; but most of the modern majolica is maιτed by a want of spirit and freedom, the natural result of its being a too servile copy of a bygone style.

Shapes of Majolica.— The most carefully finished and finest paintings are as a rule on plates, which were of various forms, from almost flat disks to the tondini with wide flat rims and deep bowl-like centres. Many of the jugs, vases, and ewers are extremely graceful in form, some suggested by the bronze vessels of ancient Rome, others taken from Greek vases. Piccolpasso gives sketches of the principal shapes, and a long list of special names, not now of much importance, as they varied in different manufactories and even workshops in the same town. The character of the non-pictorial decorations combines many different elements of style. In some of the patterns we see a survival of earlier mediaeval and native Italian taste and invention. Others, especially the large ewers of Cafaggiolo and Faenza, have flowers taken from Persian pottery, but treated in a thoroughly original way. Some plates, painted in the silver lustre only, are almost imitations of Hispano-Moorish ware or actual majolica made in the Balearic Islands. In all the scroll - patterns, mingled with grotesques, it is easy to trace the influence of the ancient wall - decorations from the baths of Titus and other buried buildings, the discovery of which at the beginning of the 16th century did so much to destroy the lingering mediaeval spirit and substitute a pseudo-classical style, which finally had so fatal an effect on all branches of art in Italy.

Collections. — The chief collections of the majolica of Italy are those of the South Kensington Museum (perhaps the most completely representative of all), the Bargello in Florence, the museums of Milan, Venice, Turin, Pesaro, Urbino, and other places in Italy. The Hôtel Cluny and the Louvre in Paris, the Ceramic Museum at Sèvres, as well as Limoges, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, and St Petersburg, have good collections. The British Museum collection is not large, but it is one of the most important, from the number of “signed” pieces that it contains, and from the fact that nearly all its specimens are remarkable for their exceptional beauty or some point of special interest. Literat ure.— For Italian majolica, see Vasari, Lives of Battista Franco, Buon- talenti, and Luca della Robbia (e<l. Milanesi, 1882); Meurer, Italienische Majolica-fliessen, 1881; Corona, La Ceramica, 1879; Vanzolini, Istorie delie fabbrichc di Majoliche, Pesaro, 1879 (a most valuable reprint of the best old treatises on the subject, including Piccolpasso’s illustrated MS.); Darceland Delange, Faiences Italiennes, 1864; Fortnum, South Kensington Museum Catalogue of Majolica, 1873; Jacquemart, Les Majoliques de la collection Campana, 1862, also article in Gaz. des Beaux-Arts, xiii. p. 289; Drake, Venetian Ceramics, 1868; Lazari, Notizia della raccolta Corner, 1859; Raffaelli, Maioliche lavorate in Castel Durante, 1846; Bonghi, Majoliche di cittàdi Castello, 1856; Casati, Les Faïences de Diruta, 1874; Caιnpori, Maiolica di Ferrara, 1871; Delsette, Maioliche di Pesaro, 1845; Frati, Maioliche di Pesaro, 1844; Torteroli, La Maiolica Savonese, 1856; Pungileoni, Pitture in Maioliche di Urbino, 1857; Branealeoni, Μ astro Giorgio di Gubbio, Pesaro, 1857. For information on the marks on majolica, see Genolini, Maiol. ital., Marche e Monogrammi, Milan, 1881; and De Mély, la Céramique ital., Sigles et Monogrammes, Paris, 1884. Many valuable articles on majolica are scattered through the volumes of the Gaz. des Beaux-Arts. Section XI.— Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish.— Spanish pottery is for the most part a coarse imitation of Italian majolica, chiefly made at Valencia, Triana (Seville), and Talavera. Some of the enamelled ware made at the last-named town is elaborately painted with figure-subjects in blues, yellow, green, and manganese purple, of extremely bad taste and feebleness of drawing. The simpler pottery made at Valencia a little before and after the year 1700, though rudely painted, is very decorative in effect. Large plates often have conventional flowers or profile heads, somewhat after the style of some of the earliest majolica of Italy, and are coarsely painted in blue and yellow. In the 18th century good enamelled pottery was made at Alcora, painted only in blues, often in the Chinese style. Some large vases of Moorish shape have very effective blue and white paintings of animals, flowers, and landscapes. A quite different style of enamelled pottery was made at Puente del Arzobispo in the 16th or 17th century. Specimens are rare; they consist chiefly of plates decorated in a very skilful and effective way, somewhat after the fashion of Moorish wall-tiles, “azulejos” (see Tiles). They are made of coarse red clay covered with white enamel, through which (before firing) the outline of the design was scratched down to the red body. The spaces between the incised lines were filled in with coloured enamels, rich blue, green, and orange, and the whole glazed with a very fusible lead glaze. The simple and mosaic-like patterns thus formed, either conventional flowers or heraldic animals, are extremely decorative and telling.

Portuguese.— Little or no enamelled pottery of Portuguese workmanship earlier in date than the 17th century is known to exist. Rato was one of the chief places for the manufacture of enamelled wares, which are coarsely painted, like the latest and poorest kinds of Italian majolica, and are not earlier in date than 1767, when the Rato potteries were first started. Other earlier specimens of unknown make also exist, and are marked with an “R,” like the Rato ware, to which they are very superior both in design and execution. The best are in blue and white only; many are marked with various dates during the 17 th century.

Piscuit Pottery of Spain and Portugal.— The earliest kinds now existing of Spanish pottery without either enamel or glaze are chiefly large wine-jars, li tinajas,” about 3 or 4 feet high, of graceful amphora-like shape, stamped with simple patterns in relief. Some of them date from the time of the Moorish occupation. Both Spain and Portugal have always been remarkable for the fineness and beauty of their potter’s clays, and consequently have for long excelled in the production of simple biscuit wares, uncovered by either enamel or glaze. Very graceful pottery of this sort is manufactured even at the present day, the shapes being traditional, handed down from century to century with but little change, many vessels being still modelled after the old Roman forms. Some of this ware is of a white porous clay, like pipeclay, and some is of a fine red, close in texture, with slight surface gloss, almost like the Roman “Samian.” One common kind is decorated in a very fanciful and ingenious fashion by the application of simple but rich surface ornaments, modelled by hand in relief, or applied in the state of semi-fluid slip. Other curious water-jars are made double, the outer vessel being pierced with patterns of open-work. A third variety has sparkling particles of quartz stuck on its surface while moist, a very old method of decoration, which was even practised by the potters of prehistoric times. On the whole, the modern biscuit wares of Spain and Portugal are among the most truly artistic and interesting of any that are now made in Europe. It is still a living art, with simple beauty both in material and shape, not a laboured revival of a dead style, or dull copy of the artistic productions of a far-off time when fitness linked with grace came naturally to the humblest workman.

Section XII.— French from the 16th to the 18th Century.

During the 16th century two very different but equally remarkable sorts of pottery, decorated with great elaboration, were made in France. One was that invented and manufactured by Bernard Palissy, which was a fine earthenware, usually modelled in relief, covered with a white tin enamel, and painted with manv briσht ml∩∏rs App Palissy). The other, Oiron pottery, popularly called “faience Henri deux,” is very different both in design and execution. This rare and curious ware, of which only about forty pieces are known, was made by a potter called François Cherpentier for his patron, a rich and artistic widow lady, named Hélène de Hangest, who established a workshop and kiln at her Chateau d’Oiron, in the province of Thouars, between the years 1524 and 1537. The manufacture was carried on by Hélène de Hangest’s son for some years after her death, but the pieces then produced are inferior in quality, and soon ceased to be made at all. This ware is not enamelled; it is simply a fine white pipeclay, to which a delicate cream-tint is given by a very slight tinge of yellow in the lead glaze. Its forms are very elaborate, sometimes extremely graceful, but occasionally too fanciful, and overloaded with ornament. It consists of plates, tazze, holy-water pots, ewers, salt-cellars, and other varieties of shape, generally forms more suited to metal than to clay, ornamented with very graceful interlaced strap-work and arabesques, such as were much used by the great Augsburg and Nuremberg workers in silver. The method in which many of the ornaments are executed is the chief peculiarity of the ware: they are first incised or stamped into the soft clay of the vessel, and then the sunk patterns are filled up with different clay pastes, tinted with dark brown, soft yellow, or buff. Many of the delicate leafornaments appear to have been formed with a metal stamp; some are exactly the same as those used by contemporary bookbinders. The ornaments are not all done in this laborious manner; some are simply painted under the glaze, especially on the later productions of Oiron. Monograms and emblems occur frequently, the salamander of Francis I.,the “H. D.” for Henri deux, the royal inter laced crescents, or coats of arms (see No. 15). Fig. 61 shows a beautiful covered tazza in the Louvre, made during the reign of Francis I.

There are eleven pieces of this ware in the Louvre; the Kensington Museum has five; but the greater number of known specimens are in the possession of members of the Rothschildfamily. It whs at one time thought to be the production of a pottery under the patronage of Henry II., and hence the name by which it was formerly known; but its real origin was established from clear documentary evidence published in Μ. Fillon’s valuable monograph on the subject.

Throughout the period we are now considering enamelled pottery was produced at a very large number of French towns, often with the help of potters from Italy; and the introduction of the tin enamel soon superseded the earlier sort of ware with a bright green or blue glaze, which at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century was the chief and most artistic kind of pottery that was made in France. The change was not wholly a gain, as pieces of the older ware were moulded in relief with designs of great beauty mostly Gothic in feeling—especially those made at Avignon, Savigny, and Beauvais; the reliefs on the older French ware are very delicate and sharp, and often of great decorative effect. Nevers was one of the chief manufactories of enamelled ware; from about 1570 to the end of the 17th century it produced mostly poor copies of the later sort of Italian majolica. After that a strong Oriental influence set in, and a peculiar ware with a deep-blue enamel ground was made, very like that produced by the Venetian potters. Some of this, painted in white enamel only, with Persian designs, is effective and pleasant in colour (see fig. 62). Other pieces have flowers, treated in a more realistic way, painted in harsh yellow, green, and red, quite out of harmony with the rich blue ground. J. Bourdu, a potter working at Nevers from 1602 to 1620, signed his ware with mark No.

16; another, named H. Borne, used No. 17. During the 18th century Nevers chiefly produced pottery of Chinese forms, painted in blue with Chinese figures and flowers, and also a large quantity of pottery painted in many colours with coarse designs, somewhat after the Delft style. The 17 th-century enamelled }>ottery of Rouen is the finest of the ater French wares. It is mostly painted in rich red and blue only, with very minute and well-designed arabesques of geometrical form, adapted, not copied, with great skill and taste from Oriental designs (see fig. 63). Very large plates, wine-coolers, hanging cisterns, and ewers are made of it.

One very rare variety has the blue and red pattern on a deep orange ground, but it is very inferior in artistic effect to that on the white ground. The finest specimens were made before 1700; after that time the painting became coarser. Copies of Chinese wares were also made at Rouen in the 18th century, all gaudy in colour, and mostly poor in execution. The Rouen Museum has the best collection of its native ware; there are very fine specimens also in the South Kensington Museum. During the 18th century Moustiers produced some very decorative pottery, painted in various shades of blue, with delicate wreaths, masks, and arabesques, somewhat after the Rouen fashion. Other colours were also used in very minute patterns, but the simple blue and white is the best. Blue and white pottery with fairly good designs was also manufactured at St Cloud, Sceaux, and Saint Amand, as well as many other French towns, during the first half of the 18th century. Most, however, of the French wares of this date are little better than imitations of porcelain, and their decoration feeble copies of Chinese or Japanese designs.

Literature. —For Oiron ware, see Delange, Recueil de . . . Faïence . . . dite de Henri II. , 1861; Fillon, Les Faïences d'Oiron, 1863 (best work); Tainturier, Les Faïences dite lie Henri II., I860. For Rouen ware, see Delisle, Faïence de Rouen, 1865; Pottier, Histoire de la Faïence de Rouen, 1870; Ris-l’aquot, Faïences de Rouen, 1870. For other French potteries the reader may consult Clement de Ris, Faïences Françaises, Musée du Louvre, 1871; Mareschal, Faïences Anciennes et Modernes, 1867; Tainturier, Porcelaine et Faïence (Alsace et Lorraine), 1868; Houdoy, La Céramique Lilloise, 1869; Davillier, Faïence de Moustiers, 1863; De Segange, La Faïence de Nevers, 1863; Pouy, Les Faïences d’Origine Picarde, 1874; Fillon, L’Art de Terre chez les Poitevins, 1864. The various volumes of the Gaz. des Beaux-Arts contain many valuable articles on the whole subject.

Section XIII.— Medlev al German, Dutch, <fcc.

Though little is known of the early ceramic history of Germany, it is certain that the application of a tin enamel and enamel colours was known to the potters of that country even in the 13th century. Some plaques, with heads in relief, painted in various colours over a white enamel ground, still exist at Leipsic; they were made for wall-decoration, and are said to be of the year 1207. At Breslau there is a monument of enamelled clay to Henry IV. of Silesia, made about 1300. According to one story, the use of a white tin enamel was perfected at Schelestadt by an Alsacian potter who died in 1283. Other examples exist, though few in number, at various places in Germany, sufficient to show an early acquaintance λvith the method of producing enamelled ware, which, however, seems to have fallen into disuse, and during the 15th and 16 th centuries to have been superseded by the fine sorts of stoneware, in the manufacture of which the German potters were so widely celebrated.

Grey stoneware, richly decorated with delicate stamped patterns in relief, and generally, though not always, covered with a lead glaze, was produced in great quantities in Germany, Flanders, and Holland from the end of the 14th century till quite modern times, and was very largely imported into England and France. Much of this stoneware (called by the French “grès de Flandres ”) is decorated with great delicacy and taste; its tint, grey, brown, or cream-white, is very soft and agreeable. The earlier specimens have reliefs of a Gothic character, always stamped with great crispness and sharpness, not the least blunted by the process of firing; many have elaborate coats of arms, or branches of simple foliage, which spread gracefully over the surface of the vessel; others have bands of figures, very minutely treated in slight relief. Another method of decoration was by incised patterns, impressed from relief-stamps; sometimes, as was the case with the Oiron ware, bookbinders’ dies were used for forming such patterns in the soft clay. Some of the cream-white ware is left unglazed, but most kinds have a vitreous lead glaze, either colourless or mixed with oxide of cobalt or manganese. These two colours, indigoblue and purple-brown, are often used to pick out the relief-patterns, thus making the design more effective. Owing to the use of old stamps and traditional designs much of this pottery has patterns considerably older than the ware itself, the date being frequently introduced among ornaments which look very much earlier than they really are. Fig. 64 shows a common form of jug, called a “greybeard” from the grotesque head modelled on the neck. The body of the jug is covered with very graceful scroll-work of oak branches in low relief.

Another curious variety of German pottery, consisting chiefly of tankards and jugs, made to imitate enamelled metal-work, was manufactured mostly at Kreussen in Bavaria. The body is of hard red clay, covered with a dark-brown enamel, the designs in slight relief being taken from the Augsburg or Briot style of metal-work, —strap-work, wreaths, grotesques, or human figures. A favourite design has reliefs of the twelve Apostles, little more than an inch high, under flat architectural canopies; a strong Gothic feeling in the treatment of such figures occurs on tankards made as late as the end of the 17th century. The coloured decoration of this ware is very brilliant; the minute figures or ornaments are picked out in bright enamel colours—red, green, blue, and yellow —altogether producing a very striking but thoroughly unceramic effect. A quite plain stoneware, with surface slightly mottled with grey and brown, appears to have been one of the most esteemed varieties during the 16th century, judging from the beauty of the silver rims and lids with which wine-jugs of this kind were usually mounted. The mottling was produced by the brownish glaze running in the kiln into a granular surface, which formed a pleasant texture, something like that on an ostrich’s egg. The best qualities were made at Cologne, and largely imported into England under the name of “Cologne” stoneware. A rude kind of sgraffiato ware was also made in Germany and Holland during the 17th and 18th centuries. Coarse red-clay vessels were covered with a slip of white pipeclay, and rude figures, often of saints or kings, were scratched through the white down to the red body. The whole was then glazed with a yellowish lead glaze. Böttger, the first maker of Meissen porcelain, manufactured curious varieties of pottery at the beginning of the 18th century,—especially a ware like red jasper, which was so hard that it was cut and polished by the lapidary’s wheel. It is usually marked with No. 18.

Good collections of German pottery are in the museums of Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Löwenberg, Minden, and private collections at Nuremberg; the Kensington Museum has also a number of fine specimens.

Holland.— Holland, especially the town of Delft, produced very large quantities of pottery covered with a fine white enamel. The early specimens date from the end of the 16th century. Much of this ware is very soft and pleasant in tone, and very decorative in effect, especially that in blue and white only. Designs of great variety occur, some copied from Persian or Chinese originals, others with coats of arms surrounded by graceful borders, formed of medallions and wreaths. A clever arrangement of peacocks’ feathers is a common and very effective motive, used especially for plates. Other sorts of very inferior artistic merit have paintings of flowers or human figures, coarsely executed in rather harsh colours—yellow, green, and red —mingled with the more harmonious cobalt blues and manganese purple. Many pieces of Delft ware are marked with maker’s initials, as No. 19 or No. 20, probably two members of the Kulick family, of about the middle of the 17th century.

But little pottery of any real artistic value was produced in any Western country during the 18th century, with the exception of the commoner and cheaper sorts of wares, with little or no ornament, which were still made after the old traditions. The fact is that the increasing introduction of Chinese and Japanese wares and the widely-spread manufacture of porcelain in the West gave the death-blow to the production of pottery designed and decorated after simple and natural methods. The enamelled pottery of the 18th century was mostly little better than a bad imitation of porcelain, a material which has a beauty quite its own, and requires forms and methods of decoration very different from those that are suited even to the most finely-enamelled earthenware.

Literature. — See Menard van Hoorebeke, Recueil des Antiquités, 1867; Weckherlin, Vases en Grés des XVI e et XVII e Siècles, 1860; Jouveaux, Histoire de . . . Böttger, 1874.

Scandinavian.

The pottery of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden for the most part resembles that of Germany. Sweden, especially during the 18th century, was very active in the production of enamelled pottery, but little of it possesses any originality either in form or design. Perhaps the best variety is a ware made at Stockholm, covered with bluish white enamel, on which simple patterns are painted in white. The potteries of Marieberg and Rörstrand also turned out large quantities, painted mostly with very weak designs; some are imitations of Oriental wares, while other kinds are decorated in a realistic French style.

Section XIV.— English from the 16th Century.

Little except the commonest sort of domestic pottery was made in England during the 16th century. The grey mottled stoneware described above, which was largely used for sack-jugs and tankards, appears to have been wholly a foreign import, mostly from Cologne. A common item in 16th-century inventories is—“a stone jugge or pott, garnished with silver and double gylted.” The silvermounted lids were often added by English silver-workers, and are frequently very elaborately embossed and chased. It was not till quite the end of the century that certain Dutch potters started in London the making of stoneware. This English-made ware is hardly to be distinguished from that of Cologne or Holland, as it was designed and manufactured in the foreign way. Large globular jugs, stamped in relief with a grotesque bearded face and other ornaments, were one of the favourite forms. Such were called “greybeards” or “bellarmines,” from the unpopular cardinal of that name, of whom the bearded face was supposed to be a caricature (see fig. 64 above). Great numbers were made in the Low Countries and copied by the Dutch potters in London. In 1688 two German potters named Elers settled in Staffordshire, and there produced hard stoneware of very fine quality. Their process, however, soon became known to other potters.

The common wares of this time were mainly produced in the Staffordshire potteries; some were decorated in a very rude but effective way by dropping fluid white slip through a quill on to the surface of vessels made of red clay. The whole was then covered with a coarse lead glaze, made from powdered lead ore (sulphide of lead), sprinkled through a sieve on to the soft clay. The process of firing produced a vitreous glaze, composed of silicate of lead, the silica being taken up from the clay body. Thomas and Ralph Toft made a number of large plates, drinking mugs or “tygs,” and candlesticks, decorated in this way with rather elaborate designs (see fig. 65). The potter’s name and the date frequently occur among the slip ornaments, which are sometimes in red and brown on a white ground, as well as white on red. About the year 1680a new sort of glaze was invented, very useful for the common kinds of hard stoneware, and extremely durable, namely, the “salt glaze,” applied by throwing common salt (chloride of sodium) into the hot kiln when the process of firing was nearly complete. The salt was volatilized and decomposed; the soda combined with the free silica in the clay, and a coating of hard silicate of soda was formed. A very high temperature is required for this process, which is chiefly used for drain-pipes and vessels to hold corrosive acids, the salt glaze being almost indestructible.

Towards the end of the 17th century a gentleman named John Dwight spent many years in experiments to improve the manufacture of pottery, and also to discover the secret of true transparent porcelain. He appears to have been an artist of great ability, and not only made domestic pottery of Cologne ware but also modelled figures and large busts in pale-grey glazed stoneware; the British Museum possesses a fine portrait bust of Prince Rupert by him, modelled with great truth and spirit, almost recalling the touch of the old Florentine sculptors in terra-cotta. In 1671 John Dwight took out a patent for his special methods of pottery and porcelain work, and set up kilns at Fulham. Many of his receipts for porcelain exist, and have been published in Jewitt’s valuable work on The. Ceramic Art of Great Britain (1877), but no specimens of this early English porcelain are now known.

The Lambeth potteries were established at a very early period, but it was not till the 17th century that they produced ware superior to the common biscuit or lead-glazed varieties. Some pieces of about 1660 are marked with No. 21 mark. Certain Dutch potters settled at Lambeth early in the century, and started the manufacture of a finer sort of pottery, covered with a tin enamel. Most of this is in the style of the Delft wares, painted either in cobalt blues alone or with the coarse green, yellow, and manganese purple used in the more gaudy kind of Delft. The Lambeth potters also imitated Palissy ware, with high reliefs of human figures or plants and reptiles,—very poor copies of Palissy’s originals, the modelling being extremely blunt. The enamel ground has a pink tinge, and the reliefs are picked out in various colours. Some specimens of this Lambeth ware are dated on the back in blue with various years during the reigns of Charles I. and Charles II. Another variety has coarse imitations of late Italian majolica, while other pieces have English designs,—coarse portraits of Charles II. and his queen, with arabesque borders, all very rudely executed.

The beginning of the 18th century in England saw a great increase of activity in the production of many kinds of pottery. Numbers of patents were taken out and new kilns set up at a great many different places. Though many improvements were made in the preparation and combination of different clays and considerable advances in technical skill were gained, yet little pottery of any artistic value was made.

Wedgwood Ware.— The Wedgwoods were an old Staffordshire family, and one member at least was a potter in the 17th century. This was John Wedgwood (1654-1705), the great-uncle of Josiah, who in the next century founded the great pottery which he called “Etruria.” Only one piece signed by John Wedgwood is known to exist; it is in the interesting historical collection of ceramic wares in the Jermyn Street Museum of Geology, London. It is a “puzzle jug” with three spouts and a hollow handle, made of coarse brown clay, covered with the usual green lead glaze. The potter’s name and the date 1691 are incised round the jug.

In the middle of the 18th century, when Josiah Wedgwood was a young man, a great impulse had been given to the study and appreciation of classical art, partly through the discovery of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and also on account of the growing enthusiasm for the beautiful Greek painted vases, which were then being sought for with great avidity in the tombs of Etruria and Magna Graecia. Josiah Wedgwood devoted his life and great talents to an attempt to reproduce the severe beauties of the Greek and Roman pottery. Unfortunately in this not unpraiseworthy aim he neglected the special requirements of fictile work. His productions, delicate and beautiful as they often are, have the characteristics of anything rather than pottery. With great labour and expense he turned out from his workshops imitations, necessarily unsuccessful, of ancient engraved gems and camei, of jasper, basalt, or mottled marbles, of gem-like cut glass, such as the Portland vase, and dull copies, feeble in drawing and hard in texture, of beautiful painted Greek vases. Of natural methods of decoration suitable to pottery, or of the life and freedom of the plastic clay rising into graceful forms under the touch of the thrower’s hand aided by the rhythmical movement of the wheel, he knew nothing. Nearly all his pottery is dully scholastic and archaeological in style, and therefore must, on the whole, be regarded as a failure, though often a very clever and even beautiful failure.

Wedgwood’s most characteristic ware, in the production of which he was aided by Flaxman and other able artists, consists of plaques and vessels, vases, cups, plates, and other forms moulded in clay, delicately tinted blue, brown, and various colours, on which minute cameo reliefs in white paste were applied while they were soft, and were then fixed by firing. Many of them have very beautiful figures, some copied from Greek and Roman gems or vases, others being specially designed for him · but all are classical in style. Some of his pieces are quite astonishing for their microscopic delicacy of detail; others have wreaths, foliage, and minute diaper ornaments applied in the same way. Wedgwood also produced very fine and porcelain-like varieties of white enamelled pottery, some even decorated with a metallic lustre, purple in colour, and mottled to imitate marble; some are cleverly modelled to imitate large sea-shells. Indeed his technical methods were varied with the utmost ingenuity, and would need a treatise to themselves if even a rough outline were given of all the varieties.

Towards the end of the 18th century many imitations were made of the Wedgwood cameo ware by different English manufacturers, and even at Sèvres it was copied in porcelain, though with original French designs. None, however, are equal to Wedgwood’s work, either in beauty of design or delicacy of execution.

Until quite recently little or no pottery of any artistic merit has been produced in England during the present century, partly owing to the absurd notion that pottery is a sort of inferior porcelain, and should be made to resemble it as much as possible, and also very largely on account of the invention in the 18th century of a process (described below) for printing patterns under the glaze, so as to avoid the labour of painting them by hand. Other modern so-called improvements of manufacture have done much to destroy all true art in English pottery; such are the too finely ground and artificial mixtures of different materials, the great use of the mould in preference to the potter’s wheel, and, most fatal of all, the fact that, when the pottery is thrown on the wheel, it is afterwards handed over to a workman who turns it on a lathe and rubs it down with glass-paper, as if it were a block of wood, thus removing all the surface put on the vessel by the touch of the thrower’s hand. Indeed, the great manufactory of Sèvres has now so completely lost all sense of the natural and reasonable treatment of plastic clay that the larger vases are cast whole by being poured in a fluid state into a mould, a method reasonable, enough for iron or bronze but ludicrously inappropriate to plastic clay. Some few manufacturers have, however, of late tried to produce pottery shaped and decorated in a more natural way. The Lambeth pottery produces a good deal of excellent work, especially ware covered (after the Japanese fashion) with one brilliant enamel colour. Mr William De Morgan of Chelsea and Merton has perhaps made the greatest advances of all, having rediscovered the way to make and use the beautiful thickly-glazed blues and greens of the old Persian ware, and also the fine silver and copper lustres of Gubbio and Spain. He uses these splendid colours in designs conceived and drawn with the old spirit, but of sufficient originality to make them a real stage in the development of ceramic art, not a mere archaeological revival of styles and methods which have long ceased to have a significance and life of their own.

Sad though the confession is, it must be admitted that, to find a class of pottery designed with lines of natural beauty and produced in accordance with the simple requirements of plastic clay, it is, for the most part, necessary to go, not to the centres of our boasted 19th-century civilization with its countless devices for turning out work cheaply and rapidly, but rather to the humble workshops of more primitive races, among whom the commercial spirit has not yet destroyed all inborn feeling for true art and beauty.

Literature.— For English pottery, see Jewitt, Ceramic Art of Great Britain, 1877; Solon, Old English Potter, 1883; Owen, Ceramic Art in Bristol, 1873; Wallis and Bemrose, Pottery of Derbyshire, 1870; Mayer, Art of Pottery in Liverpool, 1855; Binns, Potting in Worcester from 1751 to 1851, 1865; Church, Catalogue of English Pottery, 1870; some of these works deal more with porcelain than pottery.

Section XV.— Ancient Mexican, Peruvian, Ac.

The pottery of ancient Mexico and Peru, certainly older than the Spanish conquests in America, and possibly dating from a much more remote age, has many points of interest. Large quantities in good preservation have been discovered in the tombs of chiefs and other important persons of those once powerful and (in a somewhat barbaric way) artistic races. Much of their pottery is grotesque and even hideous in shape, modelled in the forms of semi-human monsters; it is often made of a hard black clay, well burned, something like the early black wares of Etruria. Another kind is graceful and natural in shape, formed with great taste and skill on the potter’s wheel. Many of the forms seem to have been suggested by vessels madeof gourds.

The decoration is very curious; many of the simple painted patterns with geometrical designs and hatched lines call to mind the earliest type of painted decoration on the archaic pottery of Mycenae and the Greek islands. The clay is fine in texture and has a slight surface-gloss, apparently the result of mechanical polishing. Fig. 66 shows a typical form. The British Museum has a good collection of this ware. The natives of Arizona and other uncivilized races of America even now make simple pottery decorated with taste and true decorative feeling.

Section XVI.— Pottery and Porcelain of China and Japan.

In the methods of treatment employed in China and Japan the usual distinctions between pottery (earthenware) and porcelain (kaolinic ware) are not always observed. In many cases these two different materials are treated in exactly the same way and decorated after the same fashion. It will therefore be convenient to describe them both together.

History of Chinese Porcelain.— The chronological arrangement of Chinese wares is a matter of great difficulty. Many of the professedly historical records of the Chinese themselves are quite untrustworthy; as with all other arts, they have claimed for the manufacture of porcelain an antiquity far beyond the actual facts of the case. This exaggerated estimate of the antiquity of Chinese porcelain was for a long time supported by the supposed discovery in Egypt of certain small bottles made of real porcelain, and inscribed with Chinese characters, which were said to have been found in tombs at Thebes dating as early as 1800 b.c. The fact, however, that they are inscribed with quotations from Chinese poets of the 8th century a.d., and have characters of a comparatively modern form, shows that the whole story of their discovery is a fraud. The only native work which gives trustworthy information on the development of Chinese porcelain is a History of the Manufactory of King-te-chin, compiled from earlier records in 1815 by a native official, which was translated into French by Μ. Julien, under the title Histoire de la Fabrication de la Porcelaine Chinoise (Paris, 1856). According to this work, the manufacture of pottery is said to have commenced in 2697 b.c., and that of porcelain during the Han dynasty, 206 b.c. to 25 a.d. The Tsin dynasty (265-419 A.D.) was remarkable for its blue porcelain, and the Suy dynasty (581-618 a.d.) for its fine green ware. One of the most celebrated kinds of porcelain was that made about 954 a.d., deep sky-blue in colour, very glossy in texture, extremely thin, and sounding musically when struck. Even small fragments of it are treasured up by the Chinese, and set like jewels. Most dynasties seem to have been famed for a special variety of porcelain. The earlier sorts appear not to have been decorated with painting, but were all of one rich colour. Decorative painting did not apparently come into general use before the Yuen dynasty of Mongols (1260-1368), and was brought to great perfection under the Mings (1368-1644). The porcelain of the last-named dynasty is classified in periods, four of which (from 1426 to 1567) were greatly esteemed. Probably few specimens of Chinese porcelain known in Europe are earlier in date than the time of Kang-he, the second emperor of the Tsing dynasty (1661-1722). During all periods Chinese potters were constantly in the habit of copying earlier styles and of forging their marks, so that very little reliance can be placed on internal evidence. Indeed, the forgeries often deceive the Chinese collectors of old porcelain.

Manufacture of Porcelain.— It is made from two substances, “pe-tun-tse” and “kao-lin”; the latter is a white pasty substance derived from the decomposition of felspathic rocks such as granite. It is a hydrated silicate of alumina (A1 2 O 3 .2SiO. 2 + 2H 2 O), and derives its name from a hill near King-tih-chin, where it was first found (see Kaolin). The precise nature of pe-tun-tse is not exactly known, but it appears to resemble kaolin, with the addition of a considerable proportion of free silica. The result of their mixture is shown in the following analysis by Μ. Laurent of the body of white Chinese porcelain—silica 70 ’ 5 per cent., alumina 20’7, potash 6, lime 0 ’ 5, protoxide of iron 0 - 8 per cent., magnesia a trace. The white pastes of which the porcelain is made are very carefully washed, finely ground, and mixed in due proportion. The paste is “thrown” on the potter’s wheel in the usual way and set to dry; its coloured decoration is then applied, and over that the transparent glaze is laid. This is a very hard and beautiful substance, which requires great heat to fuse it; it is made of almost pure felspar with an alkaline flux. It is finely ground with -water, and either blown with a pipe on to the vessel or the vessel is dipped into it. The porcelain is next packed in clay boxes or “saggers,” piled one above another in the kiln, in order to protect it from discoloration from the smoke. After the kiln has been heated for a considerable time to a very high temperature, the fire is withdrawn; and the porcelain is allowed to cool slowly in the clay saggers before the kiln is opened and its contents removed. Additional decoration is frequently added over the glaze, generally in enamel colours, applied thickly so as to stand out in perceptible relief; gilding is also added over the glaze. The porcelain is afterwards fired a second time in a more open kiln, and at a lower temperature.

The methods of decoration on Chinese porcelain are extremely varied, and are applied with the most skilful hand and wonderful fertility of design; but they are always dainty and feebly pretty rather than artistic, except when there is a Persian element present. The Chinaman is a born maker of graceful toys, full of ingenuity and perfect deftness of touch, but hardly worthy to be classed as a producer of serious works of art. The general forms of the porcelain are mostly feeble, and often of extreme ugliness, while the skill in drawing is mostly confined to representations of flowers, some of -which, especially the chrysanthemum and the paeony, are painted with great truth and enjoyment. With the beauties of the human form the Chinaman has no acquaintance or sympathy, and he never possessed the -wonderful skill of the Japanese in the delineation of animals and birds.

Only a few chief examples among the many methods of decorative treatment can be mentioned here. A useful classification has been adopted by Mr A. W. Franks in his valuable catalogue of his own collection of porcelain, formerly exhibited at Bethnal Green, and now (1885) in the British Museum.

1. Plain white, of a delicate ivory colour and a rich satin-like glaze. Some of it is crackled, not accidentally, but by a careful process, one of the methods of which is this. Powdered steatite is mixed with the materials of the felspathic glaze, and the porcelain vessel or statuette, after the glaze is applied, but before firing, is set in the rays of a hot sun, which causes it to be covered with a network of fine cracks, going through the skin of glaze down to the porcelain body. Red pigment or black Chinese ink is then rubbed into the minute cracks, which are thus made more conspicuous, and prevented from quite closing up in the heat of the kiln. Many specimens have two sets of crackle, first the coloured cracks produced before firing, and secondly an intermediate uncoloured set, produced in the glaze by the action of the kiln (see fig. 67). Most of this white ware is decorated with delicate surface-reliefs of flowers or figures very sharply moulded.

Old specimens of it are now highly valued in China. It was frequently copied in the early European porcelain manufactories, such as Saint Cloud, Meissen, and Chelsea.

2. Porcelain covered with one Enamel Colour.— Enamels of many varieties of tint and great brilliance were used: the finest are blue, from copper or cobalt; deep red, another oxide of copper; yellow, antimoniate of lead; and black, oxides of iron and manganese. One of the most beautiful is that sea-green tint called “céladon,” which was early exported into England, and highly valued in mediaeval times from its supposed property of changing colour at the contact of poison. New College, Oxford, possesses a bowl of this ware, mounted in silver richly worked, of about 1500 a.d., and presented to the college by Archbishop Warham early in the 16th century. A specimen of this céladon ware is probably referred to among the list of new-year’s gifts to Queen Elizabeth as “a cup of grene pursselyne” given by Robert Cecil. The fine old yellow porcelain was only made for the use of the emperor of China, and it is consequently rare; it is very thin and transparent, almost like a vitreous enamel. Some of the Chinese enamelled wares are made of pottery, not of porcelain; earthenware, in many cases, was equally good for the purpose, as the body of the vessel was hidden by the coloured enamel.

3. Porcelain decorated with several Enamels or Glazes of different Colours.— This ware is frequently moulded in relief, with dragons, flowers, or various animals, picked out in different colours, often very harsh and gaudy in effect. Fig. 68 shows a pilgrim-bottle painted in enamel colours. The beauty both of form and of decoration for which this piece is very remarkable is mainly due to Persian influence.

4. Porcelain painted in White Enamel over a Ground of Coloured Enamel. — This is a very decorative sort of ware; the designs, such as flowers, birds, and insects, are applied thickly in the white pigment, and are sometimes carefully modelled in low relief. The method was largely imitated by the Persians (see p. 620 above).

5. Porcelain painted only in Blue.— This is really the most artistic and highly decorative of all the varieties of Chinese painted wares. Some of the large plates and jars have very good designs, treated in a not too realistic manner. Much of the finest porcelain of this class both in form and decoration shows a strong Persian influence, the result of the intercourse between China and Persia and the visit of Chinese potters to Ispahan mentioned above in the account of Persian pottery. Nanking porcelain, painted with the so-called “hawthorn pattern,” really a kind of Prunus which produces its blossoms before its leaves, was largely imported into England during the last century, and now fetches very exorbitant prices. Unluckily during the 18th century a great deal of the fine blue and white china brought into England was painted over the glaze with harsh gaudy colours in English and French porcelain manufactories, to please the degraded taste of the time, and was thus completely spoiled. Other combinations of Chinese and European work occur. Sets of porcelain were painted in China with French or English designs to suit the European market; or plain white porcelain was sent from China to be decorated at Chelsea or Bow. Very ludicrous results were produced in some cases by this mixture of style; engravings were sent from Europe to be copied on porcelain by the Chinese potters, who have in many cases laboriously painted an exact facsimile of the copper-plate lines with all their hatchings and scratchy look. Some of these were done for Jesuit missionaries in China, and Chinese plates with Catholic sacred subjects and figures of saints exist in considerable quantities. Statuettes of the Madonna were also made in China for the missionaries, carefully modelled in white porcelain after European originals; some appear to be copies from 14th-century French ivory figures, and (even in the hands of the Chinese potter) have preserved a strong resemblance to their mediaeval original. The type of the Holy Mother thus introduced appears to have been adopted by the Chinese Buddhists as a fitting representation of their goddess Kwan-lin, many figures of whom were made with but little alteration from the statuettes of the Catholic Madonna.

6. Porcelain painted in many Colours under the Glaze.— This very large class includes all varieties of form and decoration. The colours are often harsh and inharmonious, and the more elaborate figure-subjects are nearly always grotesque and ugly. Additional richness of effect is often given by the over-glaze colours, added by a second firing. Many other varieties might be mentioned, but the student must be referred for further information to the list of works on this subject given below.

Both pottery and porcelain have been used on a large scale for architectural purposes in China. The so-called “porcelain tower” of Nanking was the most prominent example. It was a very elaborate structure (see Nanking), mostly constructed of pottery covered with enamels of different colours. The usual name is misleading, as only the white portions were of real porcelain. The Jermyn Street and British Museums have specimens of its bricks and elaborate architectural features.

Japanese, Pottery and Porcelain.— In the main the technical methods used in Japan and the styles of painted ornament were introduced from China, and also to a less extent from the adjacent peninsula of Corea. Glazed pottery was first made at Seto about 1230 a.d. by a potter who had visited China. Porcelain manufacture was introduced in a similar way into the province of Hizen about 1513. On the whole the Japanese are more remarkable for their skill and almost endless methods in the production of pottery than of porcelain. No people ever approached them for marvellous fertility of invention and skill in the manipulation of all sorts of clay, pastes, enamels, and pigments. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Japanese pottery is its wonderful success in the imitation of all kinds of materials and texture of surface, one great object apparently being to make it resemble anything rather than what it really is. Wood, with its varying colours and delicate grain, ivory, bronze, lac, marble, basket-work, fruits, and countless other substances are imitated in Japanese pottery with the most perfectly deceptive effects. The utmost amount of labour and patience is often spent with this one object, any notions of real artistic beauty being apparently never even considered.

A great deal of Japanese ceramic ware is simply copied from Chinese porcelain, and often has forged Chinese marks. It is very difficult to find out what notions the Japanese themselves really have as to what is admirable in pottery. A purely archaeological interest in old sorts of ware appears to affect them strongly, and they often put the highest value on what appears a very ordinary and rudely-made kind of pottery. As Mr A. W. Franks has pointed out in his introduction to a native report on Japanese pottery, published by the Science and Art Department, 1880, the high value which they put on rude specimens of glazed pottery is partly kept up by the existence of certain curious old tea-drinking ceremonies, solemnly performed as if they were religious rites. Everything used and every detail of the performance were strictly prescribed by rule. The bowl or cup out of which the tea was drunk by the guests was to be an archaeological curiosity remarkable for its age, not for any intrinsic merit. Some of these cups which have been brought to Europe are of coarse clay, ill-formed, thick, highly glazed, and quite without ornament. One in the Sèvres Museum, said to be Seto ware of the 14th century, is made of mottled yellowish brown clay, with a thick vitreous glaze. It looks quite worthless, but has evidently been highly valued by its Japanese owner, for it has a beautifully made ivory lid, and is protected by three cases,—first, fine white silk with gold cord; second, a box of polished bamboo; and, outside of all, a case of figured linen lined with silk. Others of these precious teabowls are red, purple, black, or grey, all very thick and coarse, but highly glazed, and carefully fitted into silk cases.

Some of the Japanese methods for the decoration of pottery are simple and effective, especially a ware made of grey clay with incised patterns—birds, flowers, and the like—filled in with white paste, and the whole glazed,— similar in method to the 16th-century Oiron ware.

The most magnificent sort of pottery is the Satsuma ware, originally introduced from Corea. It was at first manufactured in a private factory belonging to the prince of Satsuma, but afterwards produced for public sale. The most highly-decorated kinds with many colours were not made till the end of the 18th century. In minute richness it is probably the most elaborate ware ever produced. The body is a fine ivory-white clay, covered with a minutely crackled glaze. Over this, miniature-like paintings of human figures or flowers are executed in brilliant enamel colours, some of which stand out like jewelled reliefs. It is further decorated with delicately moulded patterns in gold, and, though very weak in real decorative effect, is a marvel of rich workmanship. Most of the so-called Satsuma now sold is a poor imitation of χ the ware, and is made in great quantities at Awata and Ota.

It should be observed that nearly all the very elaborate and magnificent methods of ceramic decoration now so much employed by the Japanese are of quite modern origin; before the present century the simpler methods of China were almost exclusively followed in Japan. During the last century great quantities of porcelain, chiefly decorated in gold, green, and a rich red, were made expressly for export, and largely brought into Europe, where they were frequently copied, especially in the porcelain works of Dresden and the early china manufactories of England.

The Japanese have little or no sense of the best kind of decorative art; their paintings of flowers or birds, beautiful as they are, are mostly, as it were, flung across the vessel they are meant to ornament without any regard to its shape or the space to be occupied. Like the Chinese, they have no feeling for the beauty of the human form, or even of some of the nobler animals, such as the horse. The figures most frequently represented on their ceramic wares—the seven gods of good fortune—are all grotesquely hideous; and downright ugliness of the most repulsive sort is often selected and treated with wonderful ingenuity. Many of the paintings have a symbolical meaning; emblems of longevity (considered by the Japanese the chief of all blessings) are perhaps the favourite, such as the sacred tortoise, the crane, or the combination of three trees—the fir, the plum, and the bamboo—all of which have this special meaning.

Within the present century a new and elaborate method of decorating porcelain has been practised in Japan, the chief object of which seems to be to make a porcelain vessel look like a metal one. Brass cloisonné enamel is applied to the outer surface of porcelain vases or bowls; the strips of brass set on edge which form the outline of the design, instead of being soldered to a metal plate, are fixed in some almost incomprehensible fashion to the surface of the porcelain, and then the compartments are filled in with coloured enamels and fired in the usual way,—a marvel of technical skill and wasted ingenuity.

Collections of Chinese and Japanese Porcelain.— The Dresden collection is the most important historically, having been formed chiefly between 1694 and 1705. The British Museum is rich through the recent munificence of Mr A. W. Franks, who has presented to it the whole of his fine collection. The South Kensington Museum and the museums at Leyden, The Hague, and Sèvres are rich in these wares, as are also those at Vienna, Berlin, and St Petersburg.

Literature. —For Chinese and Japanese porcelain, see Jacquemart and Le Blant, Histoire de la Porcelaine, 1861-62; Jacquemart, Histoire de la Céramique, 1873; Audsley and Bowes, Keramic Art of Japan, 1875-80; Du Sartel, La Porcelaine de Chine, 1881; Graesse, Catalog der k. Porzellan-und Gefäss-Sammlung zu Dresden, 1873; Stanilas Julien, Histoire de là Porcelaine de Chine, 1856; Franks, Cat. of Coll, of Oriental Porcelain, 1878, and “Japanese Pottery,” in South Kensington Museum Handbook, 1880.

Section XVII.— Porcelain in Europe. Early Development.

In various places in Europe, especially in Italy and France, attempts to produce translucent porcelain like that produced by the Chinese were almost continually being made from the end of the 15th century down to the beginning of the 18th. The word “porcelain” is usually derived from the Italian “porcellana,” a white shell, to the smooth polished surface of which the Chinese wares bear some resemblance. Hence it should be observed that in mediaeval inventories “a cup of porcelain” often means one made of shell or mother-of-pearl. In Italy the finer sorts of majolica were often called “porcellana,” and a plate decorated “alia porcellana” meant one with a special style of painting, and did not refer to its material. During mediaeval times, when real Eastern porcelain is meant, some other word expressing where it came from was frequently added, e.y., in French 15th-century inventories “porcelaine de Sinant” is sometimes mentioned. From the 13th to the 15th century Chinese porcelain was very sparingly brought into Europe, and generally occurs among royal possessions or gifts as an object of great value. The name “china,” from the country where porcelain was made, was given to it not later than the 16th century, and perhaps earlier, having been used by the Arabs long before: “china dishes” are mentioned by Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, act ii., scene i.) as being things of value.

The main reason of the very slight success gained for so many years in the attempts to make porcelain in Europe was the fact that it was regarded as a highly artificial substance, something between pottery and glass; the many beds of kaolinic clays which exist in Europe were never thought of as being the true material of which to make it, or, if used at all, were only employed partially and in an accidental way. The earliest attempts at the production of translucent porcelain which had any practical success took place at Venice about 1470. An alchemist named Antuonio succeeded in making and firing in a kiln at San Simone, near Venice, “porcelane trasparenti e vaghissime,” described, in a document dated 1470, as being as beautiful in glaze and colour as “the porcelain from barbarous countries.” Difficulties, however, seem to have arisen, and the manufacture was not proceeded with till 1504, when a few sample specimens were made in Venice, and others again in a spasmodic way in 1518 and 1519. No specimens of the early Venetian porcelain are now known, nor any pieces of the porcelain made at Ferrara for Duke Alphonse II. about 1565-67 by Giulio da Urbino, and mentioned with high praise by Vasari. The composition of this earliest European porcelain is not known, but it probably was partly made of the white clay of Vicenza—a true kaolinic paste— often used by the majolica potters to give whiteness and fine grain to their clay.

Medici Porcelain.— The earliest manufactory of porcelain of which known specimens exist is that started in Florence, for Francesco I. de’ Medici, about the years 1575-80 by Bernardo Buontalenti (see Vasari). Francesco de’ Medici took the greatest interest in the manufacture, and, as is recorded by Galluzzi (7 storia di Toscana, 1781), moulded some of the vessels with his own hands, as complimentary presents to other princes. According to Galluzzi, Buontalenti did little more than improve on the method invented a few years earlier by the majolica potters Camillo da Urbino and Orazio Fontana, assisted by a Greek who had learned the secret of true porcelain in China. The discovery of the existing specimens of Medici porcelain is due to Alessandro Foresi, who observed its peculiar texture and, in some cases, slight transparency, and found pieces marked at the back in a way that quite confirmed his theory. These marks are the Medici arms, with its “palle” or balls, inscribed with “F. Μ. Μ. E. D. II.” for “Franciscus Medici Magnus Etruriae Dux

II.” Some pieces have a rude representation of the great dome of the Florentine cathedral, and the letter “F.” for “Florentia” (see No. 22). Scarcely forty specimens of the ware are known, which are mostly in the possession of the Rothschilds and Mr Drury Fortnum, in the royal collection at Lisbon, and the museums of South Kensington and Sèvres. They are all of a slightly creamy white, with a beautiful pearly texture, due to the rich glaze and the slight transparency of their paste; the glaze varies in thickness, and in some instances is slightly crackled. Nearly all are simply decorated in cobalt blue, under the glaze; the designs are of various styles, some purely Italian, others Persian or Chinese in character; a few have one flower painted in the middle of the space in a graceful and almost realistic way. A plate at Lisbon has a figure of St John with his eagle. Their forms are pilgrim-flasks, plates, ewers, and vases of different shapes, some very graceful and original.

The earliest dated example is among the five specimens in the Sèvres Museum; it is a square bottle with the arms of Spain painted in blue and a few touches of manganese purple; the date 1581 is introduced among the ornaments at a corner of the bottle; it was probably a gift from Francesco I. to the king of Spain. The composition of this porcelain has recently been discovered from a contemporary MS. in the Magliabecchian Library at Florence. The paste consisted of 24 parts of white sand, 16 of a crystalline frit (powdered rock-crystal 10, and soda 8), and Faenza white earth 12 parts. To 12 parts of this mixture 3 of the kaolinic clay of Vicenza were to be added. Probably to secure greater whiteness, the vessels were covered, under the glaze, with a white enamel; but this addition appears needless. They were then glazed with an ordinary silicious lead glaze. Though the final result has the beauty and some of the special qualities of the Chinese natural porcelain, yet it will be observed that this end was gained in a very difficult and elaborate manner, which must have been very costly. This, no doubt, is the reason why so few pieces were made, and why its manufacture ceased altogether with the death of Francesco de’ Medici, in 1587.

After the Medici ware ceased to be made there is a blank of nearly a century in the history of European porcelain. In 1664 a patent was granted to Claude Reverend, a citizen of Paris, which gave him the privilege of making “imitation porcelain, as fine as that from the East Indies.” No known specimens can be attributed with certainty to his workshop, though some pieces which bear mark No. 23 may have come from his hands. In 1673 another patent was conceded to Louis Poterat, who certainly did produce artificial porcelain at Rouen. Some small pieces, salt-cellars and mustard-pots, in the museums of Rouen and Sèvres, are attributed to him, and are therefore the earliest undoubted examples of French porcelain. They are of a pearly white colour, with rich glaze, not unlike the Medici porcelain in softness of texture. The ornaments, simple and delicate arabesques, are painted under the glaze in cobalt blue only. Some pieces are signed with No. 24.

Saint Cloud was the next place in France where porcelain was produced, the manufactory being carried on by the Chicanneau family, to whom a privilege was granted in 1695. The patent mentions that they had made porcelain since 1693. This early Saint-Cloud porcelain is fine in texture and glaze, and is decorated in many different styles: it is pure white, moulded with slight reliefs copied from the Chinese; or painted in many bright colours and gold with Chinese designs; or thirdly, with paintings in blues only of flowery scroll-work and grotesques. It is marked either with a sun, or with “S. C.” combined with “T.” (see No. 25), and other makers’ initials. Martin Lister, physician to Queen Anne, in an account of his travels in France during 1698, mentions a visit which he paid to the Saint-Cloud porcelain works, and speaks with great admiration of their productions. The privilege was frequently renewed during the first half of the 18th century, and the Saint-Cloud manufactory continued to be the most important in France till the establishment of the royal manufactory at Sèvres.

Other places in France during this period, from 1700 to 1745, produced a certain quantity of artificial porcelain. These were Lille, from 1711, marked with No. 26; Paris, 1722, a branch of the Saint-Cloud works; and Chantilly, from 1725.

The porcelain of Chantilly was specially intended to imitate old Japanese ware. Like the AIedici porcelain, it has a white tin enamel over the paste. It is marked with a hunting-horn (see No. 27) and painter’s initials. Porcelain of every variety of style was also made at Mennecy-Villeroy from 1735, under the patronage of the duke of Villeroy, with whose initials, “D.V.,” all the productions of the manufactory are marked. All these early varieties of porcelain λvere of the artificial or soft kind, called by the French “porcelaine à pâte tendre.”

Sèvres.

The increasing success and popularity of the porcelain produced in Germany and England induced Louis XV. to establish a private royal manufactory of porcelain, which was first started at Vincennes, with a privilege granted to Charles Adam and others in 1745. In 1753 the king himself became a partner in the works, with a third share in the property. The seat of the manufactory was then transferred to Sèvres, and the official title was assumed of “manufacture royale de porcelaine de France.” Before 1753 the royal porcelain was simply marked with two crossed L’s for Louis, but from that year a date-letter was made compulsory,—A for 1753 (see No. 28), B for 1754, and so on till 1777, after which a new doubled alphabet was started AA (see No. 29), BB, &c.; this lasted down to RR (1793), and then a less regular series of marks came into use. Till 1792 the date-letter was put between the crossed L’s, but in that year the republic substituted the letter R. Later various royal monograms and marks were used.

Till about 1770 all French porcelain was artificial or “soft” (pâte tendre) ; the discovery of kaolinic clays in France then brought about the manufacture of natural hard porcelain (pâte duré) like that made in China and Japan. This gradually superseded the soft kind, which ceased to be made at the end of the 18th century. Its manufacture has recently been revived at Sèvres to some slight extent. Μ. Brongniart, the director of the Sèvres porcelain works from 1800 to 1847, in his most valuable Traité des Arts Céramiques (1854), gives a full account of the materials and methods used at Sèvres during all periods. The soft porcelain was composed of white sand 60 per cent., nitre 22, common salt 7*2, alum 3'6, soda 3 ’ 6, and gypsum 3 - 6 per cent. This compound was roasted at a high temperature, then ground to a fine powder, and washed with boiling water. To nine parts of this mixture or frit two parts of white chalk and one of a sort of pipeclay were added. The whole was again ground, and passed several times through a fine silk sieve. Water was added to make the powder into a paste, and it was then fit for the thrower on the wheel or the moulder. Owing to the very unplastic nature of this elaborate mixture, black soap and size or glue made from parchment were added to bind the paste together under the moulder’s hands. The glaze used for the pâte tendre was an ordinary silico-alkaline glass, made fusible by oxide of lead. The coloured decorations and gilding were added after the firing of the glaze. The hard porcelain is made of natural kaolinic clays, and is glazed with almost pure felspar,—both substances very hard and infusible. The superior softness and richness of effect possessed by the pâte tendre are due to the fact that the paintings on the softer and more fusible glaze sink slightly into it under the heat of the kiln, and are, though almost imperceptibly, blended one with another. It is easy to distinguish the two pastes and glazes: pieces of the one kind can be scratched by a knife, while those of the other resist it. Nevertheless the difference in beauty between the two kinds of porcelain has been much exaggerated, and the extravagant prices which are given for the pâte tendre are greatly due to its rarity, and to its having been produced earlier than the other. The whole question, in fact, of the value of Sèvres porcelain is a highly artificial and conventional one, which can hardly be considered in accordance with the ordinary rules or canons of art. Certain special qualities were aimed at, such as brilliant colours, with absolute smoothness of surface, microscopic delicacy of painting, and the most perfect accuracy and neatness of execution throughout; and it must be admitted that the porcelain-makers gained their object with the help of ingenuity, technical skill, and unwearied patience, which must command our respect and even admiration, whatever may be our verdict as to the artistic result of their labours. Still, with all possible allowances, there is no doubt that rarity, the necessary result of the slow and laborious processes employed, is the chief reason for the extraordinary value now set on this porcelain.

The £10,000 which three flower-vases of pâte tendre fetched at a public auction a few years ago can be accounted for on no other hypothesis. The colours of Sèvres porcelain are generally harsh, and out of harmony with the pictures they surround; the forms of the various vessels too are frequently very ungraceful, and utterly unsuited to any plastic substance.

The whole of this porcelain ware, in fact, labours under the serious artistic disadvantage of being designed and decorated with no regard to suitability of material or method; the elaborate picture-subjects would have been far more fit for ivory miniature-work, and are quite without breadth of decorative effect, while the shapes of the more elaborate vases are often deliberate imitations of gold and “or moulu,” which in no way suggest the special properties of a fictile material (see fig. 69). It is difficult to realize the amount of thought and labour that was spent on the production of Sèvres porcelain. The chief chemists of France devoted their energies to the invention of brilliant and varied pigments which would stand the severe test of the kiln. The works of the best painters were used for reproduction among the painted decorations of the porcelain, and many artists of real talent spent their lives in painting these gaudy toys—on the whole a sad waste of labour and skill.

Sèvres porcelain made for actual use, such as tea-sets and dessert-services, are usually painted with flowers or figure-subjects, often in many tints, and enriched with gilding, but on a plain white ground. It is the purely decorative pieces, such as vases and flower-vessels, that are ornamented with the greatest splendour. They generally have panels with pictures on a white ground surrounded by frames of gold scroll-work; the main body of the piece is covered with one deep or brilliant colour. The chief colours are gros bleu, a very dark blue; bleu du roi, a deep ultramarine; a brilliant turquoise blue; a bright pink, the favourite colour of Madame Pompadour, but generally called “rose Du Barry”; a bright yellow, a violet, and three shades of green were also used. These brilliant colours are often further decorated with gold; a ground with circular groups of gold spots scattered over it is called “ceil de perdrix”; other kinds of diaper were also used. The most gorgeous variety of all is the jewelled Sèvres, not made till about 1780, and generally having a ground of bleu du roi or ultramarine. It is richly set with imitation jewels, chiefly turquoises, pearls, and transparent rubies, made of coloured enamel pastes, hardly to be distinguished in effect from real stones. They are set in gold, slightly modelled in actual relief, like the gilt ornaments on the richest sort of Japanese Satsuma ware.

The forms of Sèvres procelain are very varied, and, in spite of the great use of plaster moulds, many reproductions of the same design were rarely produced. Clocks, barometers, and various other objects were made of porcelain and richly decorated, and also painted panels or plaques used for furniture,—always, however, with most discordant effect. Beautifully modelled statuettes in white biscuit porcelain were made by some of the ablest sculptors of the 18th century; these usually have pedestals elaborately gilt and painted. Perhaps the worst taste of all is shown in some of the vases which have scrolls and sham metal-work moulded and gilded to produce the effect of a porcelain vase set in or moulu mounts,—a method of so-called decoration which was much imitated at Chelsea and other porcelain works. The recent “Jones bequest” to the South Kensington Museum contains a large variety of the most costly specimens of the pâte tendre of Sèvres.

Modern Processes of Porcelain-making at Sèvres. — Since the Franco-Prussian war a large new building has been constructed for this manufacture, with improved kilns, arranged in the most commodious way. It is near the Seine, at the entrance to the park of Saint Cloud. In the same building is the important Ceramic Museum, which contains the finest collection of French porcelain of all periods, and also a large series of showrooms for the exhibition of the modern productions of the manufactory. About 250 hands (men and women) are employed in the work; many of the painters and modellers are, as of old, artists of real ability.

The pâte dare, now mainly used, is composed of kaolinic clay, mostly from Limousin, but also imported from Cornwall; with it is mixed a proportion of white chalk and fine sand (silica). Each material is finely ground between mill-stones, and carefully washed by being agitated with water. The powder is allowed to settle, and the lighter impurities are carried off by decantation. The various ingredients are then mixed thoroughly together with enough water to bring them to the consistence of cream. When the mixing process is complete the cream-like fluid is run off into absorbent plaster troughs, which take up the superfluous water and leave the compound in a pasty state. The paste is next turned over frequently on a floor so as to expose the whole of it to the air, and it is thoroughly kneaded like baker’s dough by men’s feet and hands to make it more plastic for the wheel or mould. The wheel turned by the thrower’s foot is exactly like that used in Egypt under the Ptolemies, or by the majolica potters, as shown in fig. 55. While moulding his vessel the thrower keeps dipping his hands into a basin of fluid paste (“barbotine” or slip). He also increases the smoothness of surface on the revolving vessel by holding a sponge soaked in the slip between his fingers. Vessels of which a number are required all exactly alike, such as a set of plates, are partly shaped in a mould and partly formed by a steel “template” or gauge. The thrower forces a thin disk of paste over a convex mould shaped to give the inside of the plate; he then sets it, mould and all, on the revolving wheel, and a steel knife-like gauge shuts down upon it, thus forming the outside or back of the plate, which, as it revolves against the edge, has all superfluous paste scraped from it and is accurately formed into the required shape. When the plate or other vessel has been shaped it is allowed to dry, and is finished by being turned on a lathe and rubbed smooth with sand-paper. The handles and all projecting ornaments are moulded, or rather cast, by pouring the paste in a fluid state into piece-moulds made of plaster of Paris, which take to pieces and set free the casting, which is then fixed on the vessel it belongs to with a little more fluid slip used as a “lute.” The moulded ornaments are afterwards carefully finished by hand with ordinary modelling tools. Even statuettes and groups of figures are cast and finished in this way. The vase with its attached ornaments, after being thoroughly dried, is ready for the first firing.

The kilns are like tall circular towers tapering towards the top, about 10 feet in diameter at the base inside; they are divided into four stories, with perforated brick vaults between them. The fire, fed either with white wood or coke, is in the lowest story; the chamber next to the fire is of course the hottest, and the top one the least hot of the three. These different degrees of heat are utilized according to the temperature required for each firing. Thus the “raw” vessels fresh from the wheel, which only require a moderate heat to prepare them for being glazed, are piled in the highest chamber, and those that are being glazed in the lowest. In order to keep the white paste from being discoloured by the smoke the porcelain is packed in round porcelain boxes (called in English “saggers”), which fit closely one upon another and are arranged in high piles. The various chambers of the kilns have small openings, closed with transparent talc, through which the progress of the baking can be watched, and test-bits of porcelain painted with carmine, a colour that changes tint according to the heat it is subjected to, are withdrawn from time to time to show what temperature has been reached. As a rule the fire is kept up for about thirty-six hours, and the kiln with its contents is allowed from four to six days to cool before being opened.

After the first firing the porcelain is in the biscuit state, and is then ready for the glaze, which is made of felspar and quartz crystals (pure silica); it is finely ground with water, and the porcelain is dipped into it, until sufficient of the fluid mixture adheres to the absorbent biscuit to form a coat of glaze. When dry it is fired for the second time, but in the lowest and hottest compartment of the kiln, this natural rock-glaze being very infusible. About 1600° C. is the usual temperature for this process.

The painted decoration is always applied over the glaze; but within recent years a new method of under-glaze ornament has been much used, called “pâte sur pâte,” similar in method to the “slip decoration” mentioned above under several different heads. The biscuit ground of the vase is first tinted a uniform colour, and then the same white paste of which the porcelain is made is mixed with water and applied in successive layers with a brush, thus producing delicate cameo-like reliefs. Very beautiful designs of figuresubjects or flowers are put on in this way, and additional effect is gained by the coloured ground shining through the thinner parts of the semi-transparent white reliefs. The whole is then glazed in the usual way. To return to the painted porcelain, when it has come from the second firing in a white highly glazed state it is ready for the painter. Almost endless varieties of coloured pigments are gained by the use of elaborately prepared chemical compounds, all different salts of metals. In the main the blues are from cobalt, the turquoise colour from copper, the rose-pink from gold, the green from chrome and copper, and the violets from manganese. A far greater variety and brilliance of colour can be gained in over-glaze painting than in under-glaze pigments. But the over-glaze colours are very inferior in softness and decorative beauty, and are frequently very harsh and gaudy. Different pigments require different temperatures, and three distinct firings are used at Sèvres for the painting only: they are called “grand feu,” “demi-grand feu,’ and “feu de moufle.” Pure gold for the gilt parts in a very finely divided state is~ obtained by chemical solution and precipitation. The gold requires a special kiln, and firing at a higher temperature than the colour-pigments, and therefore, in the case of pâte dure, is applied first. The colours have to be put on and fired in order according to the degree of heat they require, thus very much adding to the painter’s difficulties, which are also increased by the fact that all the colours alter in the kiln, the unfired pigments often bearing no resemblance to their fired state. Thus an elaborately painted and gilt Sèvres vase passes through six separate firings, and often a seventh when it needs final retouching.

The porcelain à pâte tendre is now made in small quantities at Sèvres. Its materials have been described above. In most respects it goes through the same processes as the pâte dure, but the gold is applied after the painting, as it requires a less degree of heat to fix it on the more fusible glaze used formate tendre.

Modern Sèvres porcelain has two marks—first, the mark of the paste or undecorated vase, painted in green; second, a mark in red or gold to show that it has been painted at Sèvres. Slightly defective pieces in the white glazed state are sometimes sold and decorated elsewhere. In this case the green mark is cancelled by the cut of a lapidary’s wheel before it leaves the manufactory. Μ. Brongniart, in his Arts Céramiques, has given a complete set of plates, showing all the processes, the machinery, and the kilns used at Sèvres in his time,—that is, from 1800 to 1847. Other processes are now practised. One is for making very thin cups and saucers, like Eastern “egg-shell china,” which are formed by merely rinsing out a plaster mould with fluid paste, when sufficient of the paste to make the thin walls of the cup adheres to the absorbent mould; and thus porcelain is made much thinner than it could be by use of the wheel and lathe. Another recent invention is of great importance in the forming of large vases with bodies thin in proportion to their size. Such would be liable to collapse from their own weight while the paste was soft. To prevent this, the vase is set in an air-tight chamber, its mouth being carefully closed, and the air in the chamber round, it is exhausted, so that the soft vase is kept in shape by the expansive pressure of the air within it. The converse method is also used in some cases, by compressed air being forced into the vase. When the paste is sufficiently dry all fear of failure from this cause is over. In this way vases as much as 12 feet in height have been successfully made and fired.

In addition to porcelain shaped and painted after the 18th-century fashions, and the new pâte sur pâte process, the present manufactory produces a great deal of fine porcelain copied exactly from the fanciful and elaborate wares of China and Japan, such as the delicate double cups and vases, with outer shells of minute open work pierced through, and many other varieties requiring great technical skill and patience. Unhappily the old faults and misdirected aims still prevent the laboured products of this great factory from having much real artistic value, or even strong decorative effect. The paintings on the porcelain are still pictures like miniatures on ivory, and the treatment and forms of the most elaborate vases are not such as would arise from a natural and rational treatment of plastic clay. The ingenious resources of modern chemistry have produced pigments of countless variety of tint, but they are mostly over-gaudy and harsh in combination; and the modern habit, not peculiar to Sèvres, of applying paintings over the glaze, wilfully rejects the special soft richness of effect which a vitreous coating gives to the pigments under it.

Literature.— On French porcelain, consult Jacquemart, Histoire de la Céramique, 1873; Davillier, Les Porcelaines de Sèvres, 1870. and Les Faïences et Porcelaines de Moustiers, &c., 1863; Jacquemart and Le Blant, Histoire de la Porcelaine, 1861-62; Lejeal, Recherches sur la Porcelaine de Valenciennes, 1868; Milet, L’Invention de la Porcelaine à Rouen, 1867; Guide du Visiteur, Sèvres, 1874; Cool, Peinture sur Porcelaine, 1866; Bastenaire-Daudenart, L’Art de fabriquer la Porcelaine, 1827. See also the general list of works on ceramic art.

German and Austrian.

The porcelain of Germany was, from the first, composed of a hard natural paste, a true kaolinic clay. Its successful production was the result of a single, almost accidental, act of discovery, and not, like that of the French, of a long series of experiments with dififerent materials, ending in the invention of a highly artificial imitation of true porcelain. In the year 1700 a young chemist, or rather alchemist, of great ability, called Frederick Böttger (1682-1719), a native of Saxony, fled to Dresden under the accusation of practising magical arts and searching for the “philosopher’s stone.” He was there taken under the protection of Augustus II., elector of Saxony, who employed him to make experiments, at first connected with medical chemistry and afterwards with the composition of pastes and clays for ceramic ware. From 1701 he worked for his royal patron, partly at Dresden and partly at the castle of Meissen, carefully guarded, and kept in seclusion almost like a prisoner, in order that his discoveries might remain secret, and also to prevent his leaving the country. For nine years Böttger only produced stoneware, though of a finer and harder quality than had hitherto been made (see pp. 630-31); but in 1710 he seems to have been in some way set on the track of the secret of porcelain manufacture. His first attempts were unsuccessful: the paste is grey and defective, and there is little or no glaze. So far no real progress had been made towards the discovery of true porcelain. But in 1710 a lucky accident, combined with the young chemist’s ready powers of observation, revealed the true nature of the required paste. Having noticed the unusual weight of some new hairpowder with which his wig was dressed, he inquired what it was made of, and, finding that it was a finely-powdered white clay from Aue, near Schneeberg in Saxony, he procured some of the clay. He made vessels of it and fired them, and found that he had discovered the material of true hard porcelain, like that from, China and Japan. When Augustus II. learned the importance of the discovery he established the porcelain manufactory at Meissen with Böttger as its director. This establishment, 5 miles from Dresden, was more like a prison than a factory, being surrounded by high walls and shut in by portcullises: none except workmen were ever admitted, and they were sworn to secrecy under pain of penal servitude for life. The kaolin from Aue was dug out, packed in sealed bags, and brought to Meissen with every care possible to avoid betraying the secret of its importance; no possible precaution was omitted, and yet, in one case at least, all attemps to keep the monopoly were in vain (see below, “Vienna porcelain ”).

The earliest productions of the Meissen (Dresden) porcelain-works are copies from the Chinese and Japanese. Some are plain white, with flowers or fruit in low relief; others have painted under-glaze in blues only, like the celebrated blue and white china of Nanking. The first pieces painted with other colours are imitations of old Japanese china in green and red with enrichments in gold. Böttger died in 1719, and -was succeeded in his directorship by George Höroldt, who introduced certain improvements in the processes of the manufacture, and increased the quantity of its annual production. In his time Chinese designs were still copied, mostly very ugly figure-subjects on white panels, the rest of the vase being coloured yellow, green, or grey, and decorated with elaborate gilt scroll-work in the worst possible taste.

After about 1725 the Eastern style of design was superseded by elaborate miniature paintings of flowers and insects, or copies from Dutch and Flemish painters. All notion of true ceramic decoration was gone, and the porcelain was only regarded as a ground on which to paint an imitation of an oil - painting. Another style of decoration soon came into fashion: china was decorated in relief with the “honeycomb” or “may-flower” pattern. In the latter kind (see fig. 70) the vessel is closely studded with blossoms of the may, moulded in a realistic way, with thin crisp edges, and then coloured and gilded, very laborious to execute, and extremely disagreeable in effect. Perhaps the chief specialty of Dresden porcelain consists in its statuettes and group of figures, the best of which were made between 1731 and 1756 under the superintendence of a sculptor named Kandier. Some of these, especially the Watteau-like shepherds and shepherdesses, have a sort of feeble prettiness; but most have only little merit, and some are grotesque and wilfully ugly. They are generally decorated with colours and gilding; the best, however, are in plain glazed white. Elaborate candelabra, clocks, and other objects were largely made, into the designs of which figures in the round, flowers realistically modelled, and rococo scroll-work were introduced, generally in a feeble and ungraceful way. For some years after 1774 designs of more classical form, purer in outline and less crowded with clumsy ornament, came into fashion. Since then nothing of any real value has been produced in the Dresden china-works. Of late years, since the increase of prices given for old Dresden, the directors of the manufactory have begun to reproduce their old designs, and even to use some of the worn-out moulds; the result is that the china thus produced is very blunt and spiritless, quite devoid of merit.

The old Dresden porcelain is of a fine paste, and has a good glaze, but its white is of a rather cold tint, occasionally even having a bluish shade. It is, however, both in quality of material and in design, the best porcelain that Germany has produced. During the early period the monogram “AR” interlaced (for Augustus Rex) marks the pieces made either for the king’s use or from his design. Between 1712 and 1715 pieces made for sale were marked with a rudely-sketched snake twining round a stick. Since 1721 two crossed swords have been used as a general mark; the addition of a dot or star marks special periods (see No. 30). The swords were the arms of the elector of Saxony as arch-marshal of the empire. Some pieces have “MPM” for “Meissenen Porzellan Manufactur.” As at Sèvres, china from Dresden, if sold undecorated, has the cross-swords mark cancelled by the cut of a wheel. In 1863 the china-works were moved from the fortress of Meissen and established in a new and more convenient building.

Vienna Porcelain.— In 1720 one of the workmen escaped from the prison-like manufactory of Meissen and brought the secrets of the porcelain clay to Vienna, where he set up kilns and workshops in partnership with a Frenchman named Du Pasquier. They obtained a special patent, but had little practical success; and the Vienna porcelain was not made in large quantities till after 1744, when the manufactory was carried on under the patronage of Maria Theresa and the emperor Joseph. In 1785 there were thirty-five kilns in working order, and 500 work-people were employed. Vienna porcelain is not of a pure white, but is greyish in tint; its paintings are very poor, and it depends for its effect chiefly on gilt-moulded scroll-work in delicate relief. Its manufacture was suspended in 1864 on account of the heavy expense it entailed on the Austrian Government.

Berlin porcelain was first made in 1751 by a potter named Wegely, who marked his ware with No. 31. It was not, however, a commercial success till Frederick the Great took it in hand. He sent a number of skilled workmen from the Meissen (Dresden) china-works to Berlin, and also ordered the manufactory to be supplied with the kaolinic clay from Aue, of which Meissen hitherto had preserved the monopoly. In quality the Berlin porcelain comes next to that of Dresden; it is often decorated with a bright rose-pink, the favourite colour of Frederick, which was unknown at the Meissen works. Large quantities of porcelain are still made at Berlin.

Other Continental Porcelain of the 18th Century.

A very large number of other places in Germany produced hard natural porcelain during the 18th century, but none of their work is of any special interest or beauty. It became, in fact, the fashion for every king or reigning prince to be the patron of a porcelain manufactory. Porcelain was produced at Amsterdam and The Hague; at Brussels, Copenhagen, and Zurich; and in Russia at St Petersburg and Moscow.

In Italy also fine soft porcelain was made,—at Doccia as early as 1735, some of which, ornamented in under-glaze blues only, is very decorative and in good taste. Venice produced clever copies of Japanese porcelain, painted with chrysanthemums and other flowers in enamel. The royal manufactory at Capo di Monte, close to Naples, founded in 1736 by Charles III., produced a great deal of porcelain decorated in many styles, mostly in very bad taste.

The best are Oriental designs painted in blues only. The accompanying marks (No. 32) were used, the fleur-de-lis in 1736, the crowned N after 1759, and the RF after 1780. All the Italian porcelain is of the soft artificial sort.

The porcelain-works in the Buen-Retiro gardens at Madrid were also established by Charles III. after he succeeded to the throne of Spain. Much of this (soft) porcelain is classical in form, and is decorated with miniature paintings in colours or monochrome. Charles III. transferred thirty-two workmen and painters from Capo di Monte when he founded the

Buen-Retiro manufactory, and hence the productions of the two factories are very similar in style. One of the marks used, the lis, was common to both; the usual forms on the Buen-Retiro porcelain were those in No. 33.

Literature.— See Falke, Geschichte der k. Porzellan-Fabrik in Wien, 1867; Graesse, Geschichte der Gefässbildnerei, Porzellan-Fabrication, &c., 1853; Kärner, Die Porzellan-Malerei, &c., 1870; Kolbe, Geschichte der Porcellanmanufactur zu Berlin, 1863; Klemm, Die k. sächsische Porzellan-und Gefäss-Sammlung, 1833; Krünig, Cyclopedia, s.v. “Porzellan.”

English.

The early history of English porcelain is rather obscure. John Dwight (see p. 632 above) was apparently the first English manufacturer who took out a patent for the production of transparent porcelain; but no specimens made by him are now known.

Chelsea Porcelain.— According to Jewitt (Ceramic Art of Great Britain), John Dwight probably founded the porcelain-works at Chelsea, which rank first among English manufactories both in date and importance. In 1745 they were in full activity; and the popularity in France of English porcelain was one of the causes which led to tħe establishment of the royal manufactory at Sèvres. The owner of the Chelsea works was a Frenchman called Nicholas Spremont, who continued to manufacture fine porcelain till his retirement from business in 1764.

This porcelain is very varied in style, as was the case with most of the 18th-century makes. Some of it is simply imitated from Eastern china, either in blue and white, or in the old Japanese style, which was then so popular, chiefly painted in rich red and green, with a good deal of gilding. Other pieces, more elaborate and costly, resemble Sèvres porcelain, and have miniature paintings on white panels, the rest of the vase being coloured with one uniform tint, such as the French bleu du roi or “rose Pompadour.” One colour, peculiar to Chelsea, is a deep claret-red. Most of the vases have a great deal of gilding, both applied in patterns on the body of the vase, and also used solidly to decorate the elaborate moulded scrollwork which was fixed on the sides of the porcelain. The writhing masses of gold on Chelsea ware are probably the most meaningless and stupid attempts at decoration that have ever been produced. Many of them are designed with apparently not even an attempt at beauty of form or gracefulness of curve, and are quite without the vigour that is often possessed by the grotesques of China or Japan.

Chelsea vases of this elaborate sort are rare, as their production was slow, and they now fetch very high prices: £2000 has been given for a single vase such as that shown in fig. 71.

It should be observed that, till the discovery of the half-decomposed kaolinic clay of Cornwall about 1755 by Cookworthy, all English porcelain was of the soft variety (à pâte tendre), and was really an artificial compound with an ordinary vitreous lead glaze. The painted decoration, like that of Sèvres, was applied over the glaze, with the exception of a fine cobalt blue, which was painted on the china in a biscuit state. This colour is much the finest and most truly decorative of any of the pigments, very superior in richness of effect to the much brighter over-glaze colours. That used at the Derby porcelain-works is the most beautiful in tint.

The early success of the Chelsea porcelain was partly due to the patronage of George II., who, following the royal fashion of the age, took a great interest in the manufactory, and not only bought large quantities of its productions but also aided it by importing kaolinic clay, models, and even skilled workmen from Saxony. In 1769 the Chelsea porcelain-works were put up to auction, and bought by William Duesbury, the owner of the Derby china-factory. Till 1784 he carried on the manufacture of porcelain at both places, but in that year he pulled down the Chelsea kilns and transferred all the movable plant and the workmen to Derby. The Chelsea mark is usually an anchor, either painted in red or gold, or moulded in relief; the anchor is often double (see No. 34), and in some cases has the addition of one or more daggers. Some specimens first noted by Mr. Jewitt have quite different marks, incised on the paste before glazing, which are of special interest as being the earliest dated specimens of English porcelain. Such marks are a triangle, with the addition “Chelsea 1745.”

Bow Porcelain (Stratford-le-Bow).—In 1744 Edward Heylyn and Thomas Frye, the latter a painter of some repute, took out a patent for the manufacture of porcelain at Bow. The composition they used was a curious one, being almost a hard porcelain. The clay, which was called “unaker,” was brought from America, and was probably an impure kind of kaolin. It was ground and washed to separate the sand and mica; and to it was added pounded glass—a pure alkaline silicate—varying in proportion from equal parts of clay and glass to one-fifth of glass. The glaze was a similar mixture, with less of the American kaolinic clay. This paste and glaze must have been difficult to manage, since in 1748 the partners took out a fresh patent for a more artificial and softer kind of porcelain, with a more fusible lead glaze. In 1750 the Bow works came into the hands of Messrs Weatherby and Crowther, and were then called “New Canton.” For some time the manufactory was successful, and employed 300 hands; but before long one of the partners died, and the survivor, “John Crowther, chinaman,” was gazetted bankrupt in 1763, and the whole stock was sold off. Crowther, however, in spite of his failure, carried on the works till 1775, when they were bought by William Duesbury, the owner of the Chelsea, Derby, and other chinafactories ∙, he pulled down the Bow kilns and transferred the plant to Derby, as he did afterwards in the case of the Chelsea manufactory. The Bow porcelain is of a fine soft milky white; many of the imitations of Chinese figures are hardly to be distinguished from the originals. Some of the Bow china, decorated only in the rich underglaze blue, with Eastern designs, is very effective.

A good many pieces are painted in the Dresden style, and coloured statuettes or groups of figures, also after German models, were largely produced. The Bow marks are very numerous, some not distinguishable from those of Chelsea; No. 35 shows four varieties.

Derby porcelain is supposed to have been made as early as 1750, possibly by Andrew Planché, a clever French refugee, who in 1756 entered into partnership with Heath and Duesbury, the last of whom afterwards became the chief china-manufacturer of England. The purchase by Duesbury of the Bow and Chelsea works has already been mentioned. The Derby porcelain is often very large, elaborately moulded, and profusely decorated, generally rather in the Dresden style, weak in form and gaudy in colour. The Derby under-glaze blue was remarkably fine, and many of the plain blue and white pieces, with Chinese patterns, are highly decorative, as are also, though in a less degree, those porcelain services that were painted in the “old Japanese style.” One of the chief specialties of the Derby works was the production of delicate white figures in biscuit china, often modelled with great skill and refinement. Unfortunately the practice of printing the under-glaze patterns, instead of painting them by hand, was introduced at Derby about 1764, and did much to destroy all the artistic value of the work (see below). The marks used were these,—first a “D” combined with an anchor (No. 36), or a crowned anchor (No. 37), used during the earlier part of the time when Duesbury was carrying on both the Chelsea and the Derby factories, 1769-84; next the crown was used, either over the “D” only (No. 38), or, more usually, with a saltire or crossed swords immediately under it. Another variety has crossed lines under the crown (No. 39). The Derby works continued in the possession of the Duesbury family till 1814 or 1815, when Robert Bloor became the lessee and finally the owner of the place. He soon realized a large fortune, though to some extent at the expense of the credit and high reputation for excellence of work which had been gained and kept up by the various members of the Duesbury family. He gained a great deal of money by selling oft' the stock, accumulated during many years, of slightly defective pieces of porcelain, which the Duesbury family would not allow to go into the market. Worcester Porcelain.— The china-works at Worcester were founded by a very remarkable man—Dr Wall, who appears to have possessed unusual skill as a physician, artist, and chemist. After some years spent in attempts to discover a fine artificial porcelain, he, in conjunction with other practical men and capitalists, started the Worcester Porcelain Company in 1751. The early productions of this factory are very artistic; they are chiefly copies of the fine Nanking porcelain, painted under-glaze in blues only, with very boldly decorative designs. Old Japanese ware was also successfully imitated. After that the most ambitious pieces of Worcester porcelain were mostly dull reproductions of the elaborately painted wares of Sèvres and Chelsea. Transfer printing was first used at Worcester for designs on china in 1756, though it had been invented and employed some years earlier for the decoration of the Battersea enamelled copper. This process was no less injurious at Worcester than elsewhere to the artistic value of the paintings. Dr Wall died in 1776, and after that the porcelain-works passed through various hands. A great impetus was given to its success by George III., who visited the factory in 1788 and granted it the title of “The Royal Porcelain Works.” The earliest marks are a “W” or a crescent; others used are crossed arrows or varieties of sham Chinese marks (see No. 40). The manufacture of china at Worcester is still continued with great activity; the fineness of the paste and the skilful processes employed leave nothing to be desired. Unfortunately the old fault of a too realistically pictorial style of painted decoration still prevails, and an immense amount of artistic skill and patient labour is practically wasted in producing minute but not truly decorative work. Some of the modern Worcester copies of Eastern porcelain and enamels are very delicate and beautiful, and the cameo-like method of pâte sur pâte decoration is practised with great skill and often good effect.

Bristol porcelain is of interest as being the first hard natural porcelain made in England. As early as 1766 attempts were made by Richard Champion to make an artificial paste, with the help of the American “unaker” or kaolinic clay, which was being used successfully at Bow, but no results of any importance seem to have followed his experiments. The successful production of Bristol porcelain was due to the discovery in Cornwall of large beds of kaolinic “growan” stone or “china” stone, first brought into use by William Cookworthy, a Plymouth potter. This discovery and the succeeding one of similar beds in Devonshire were of great commercial importance to England, and the beds have ever since produced enormous quantities of material for the manufacture of fine hard porcelain both in England and abroad.

This china stone (see Cock, Treatise on China Clay, 1880) is not a pure kaolinic clay like that found in China, but is simply a granitic rock, partially decomposed, and soft and friable, but still retaining both quartz and mica in addition to the felspar, which is the essential base of kaolin. In China the processes of nature have carried the decomposition and sorting of the different com ponent parts of granite to a further stage. There the decomposed felspar has, by the action of rain and running streams, been deposited in an almost pure and finely-divided state in beds by itself, almost free from quartz and flakes of mica. In using the Cornish china stone, therefore, various natural processes have to be artificially performed before the paste is sufficiently white and pure for use; but when this is done it is little if any inferior to the Chinese kaolin. The stone when dug out is white with grey specks, and is so friable as to be easily reduced to powder between millstones. It is agitated with water, and run through a series of settling troughs; thus the lighter flakes of mica, which are very injurious to the paste, are washed away, and the pure felspathic kaolin is deposited free from impurities. Free silica is added in a fixed proportion; it is usually obtained from flints, first calcined and then finely ground to powder, which are an important ingredient in the composition of both fine pottery and porcelain. The Jermyn Street Museum has a complete collection of all the materials used in china manufacture.

William Cookwortlιy at once recognized the value of his discovery, and set up china-works both at Plymouth and at Bristol. No. 41 shows the mark of the Plymouth porcelain, and No. 42 those that were used at Bristol. In 1774 he sold the Bristol factory to Richard Champion, still retaining a large royalty on the china stone. Champion signed his ware with No. 43. The production of Bristol porcelain continued till 1781, when the works were sold to a Staffordshire company, and the manufacture of hard porcelain was no longer carried on there. Though fine in paste and unusually transparent, the Bristol porcelain has no special artistic merits. As with most other English wares, the best in colour and design are copies, with more or less adaptation from Eastern china; some of them are very large and magnificent. The figures and flower-reliefs in biscuit porcelain are also delicate, and often cleverly modelled, with wonderful realism.

Some fine blue and white china was produced towards the end of the last century at Lowestoft, and at Liverpool as early as 1756; and many other china-works were established in various parts of England. In the beginning of the present century Swansea and Nantgarw in South Wales produced porcelain which was highly esteemed; but the delicate shades of difference in the paste, glazes, and styles of decoration of these numerous varieties of British porcelain are not such as can be described in a few words; nothing but careful examination of the wares themselves will enable the student to distinguish between the productions of the different manufactories. Swansea ware bears various marks, of which No. 44 is one example.

Modern Methods of Manufacture.— The methods and materials now employed at Sèvres in the production of porcelain are in all essential points much the same as those practised elsewhere (see above). The chief centre in England of the manufacture of pottery or non-translucent earthenware is in Staffordshire, near the borders of Cheshire, where a large district devoted to this industry goes by the name of “The Potteries.” Worcester, Lambeth, and many other places in England also turn out annually large quantities of pottery. The processes employed may be divided under the following heads: —(1) choice and mixture of clays; (2) washing and grinding the materials; (3) throwing on the wheel and moulding; (4) kilns and methods of firing; (5) glazes; (6) pigments and methods of decoration.

1. Choice and Mixture of Clays. — The extensive beds of fine Dorset or Poole clay supply the chief ingredient in the manufacture of English pottery. This is too fat a clay to be used alone, and is therefore mixed with a certain proportion of free silica to prevent it from twisting or cracking in the kiln. Another ingredient is added to the mixture for the finer wares, namely, the Cornish or Devonian china stone, a kaolinic substance used in the manufacture of porcelain (see above), which makes the paste finer in texture, whiter, harder, and less brittle. These three substances are mixed in various proportions. The following makes a fine cream-coloured ware,—Dorset clay 56 to 66 parts, silica (flint) 14 to 20, china stone 17 to 30 parts.

2. Washing and Grinding the Materials.— The Dorset or Poole clay is finely ground between mill-stones, mixed with water to the consistency of cream or slip, and then passed through fine silk sieves to strain out all grit or palpable particles.- The china stone is treated in the same way, with the additional precaution of washing away all the flakes of mica, which come from the decomposition of the granitic rock from which the china stone is derived. The silica is obtained from flints, which are easily ground to fine powder after being heated red-hot and thrown into water. These three substances, brought into the state of fluid slip, are repeatedly pumped up from vats and passed through the sieves; they are then easily mixed in due proportion by being pumped into graduated vats. The water is next evaporated from the fluid mixture in large boilers heated by a complicated arrangement of flues, and the compound is left in a soft pasty state, full of air-bubbles, which have to be got rid of by constantly turning over and beating the paste till it is quite smooth and compact, and sufficiently plastic to be thrown on the wheel. Coloured earthenware, such as that Wedgwood used to make, was prepared by the addition of various substances to the fluid slip. A black colour was given by protoxide of iron and manganese, red by red ochres or red oxide of iron, blue by oxide of cobalt, and green by protoxide of chrome. These coloured pastes are but little used now.

3. Throwing and Moulding.— After sufficient kneading, the clay is made up into balls of a convenient size for the thrower to mould into shape upon his wheel. The methods both of throwing and of moulding are the same for porcelain as for pottery (see p. 638 above). Unfortunately in England, as at Sèvres, the thrown vessels are usually finished on the lathe; only the commonest kinds of ware escape this process, which takes away all life and spirit from the wheel-formed pottery. Consequently it is the cheapest and commonest wares that now, as a rule, have most natural beauty of form and really artistic spirit. Handles and other parts which are shaped in piece-moulds are either cast by pouring fluid slip into the plastermoulds, or are formed by pressing and dabbing thinly-rolled pieces of soft clay into moulds made in two parts. The moulded halves of the spout or handle are fastened together while still wet, and the edges at the junction pared down and trimmed with a modelling tool. Plates, basins, and the like are formed by the combination of a mould and a shaped gauge as described above (Sèvres).

4. Kilns and Firing.— After the vessel with its moulded handles or spout is thoroughly dry it is ready for the first firing. The usual Staffordshire biscuit-kiln is a circular building, about 18 feet in internal diameter at the base, narrowing towards the top. It is about 18 to 20 feet high, and is very carefully built of refractory fire-bricks, strengthened by rings of wrought-iron which clasp the outside. It is surrounded by eight to ten furnace openings, with flues arranged to distribute the heat equally throughout the kiln. The pottery is fired in drum-shaped “saggers” or boxes, made of fireclay, which are piled one above the other, as in the case of the Sèvres porcelain. The fire is kept up from thirty to fifty hours, and is then allowed to die out. Several days are allowed for cooling before the kiln is opened and the saggers with their contents withdrawn.

5. Glazes.— The composition of glazes for pottery varies very much according to the custom of each manufacturer. For the most part they are transparent silicates of alumina, rendered fusible by oxide of lead; this compound is made by a mixture of Cornish china stone, flint, and white lead. The best quality of glazes have borax and some alkali added as a flux, in which case the proportion of lead is reduced. Those glazes that contain much lead are easily scratched, and can be decomposed by many acids; thus there is always a risk of lead-poisoning if vessels coated in this way are used for cooking purposes. . The materials for the glaze are finely ground with water and made into a thin white fluid. The biscuit pottery is rapidly dipped into vats of the milky mixture, and sufficient to form the glaze adheres to the absorbent clay in an even coating all over the surface. After being dried the pottery is ready for the second firing in the glazing kiln, which is very similar in construction to the biscuit-kiln, only, as a rule, rather smaller. It is packed in clay saggers, as in the first firing, but a stronger heat is required to fuse the finer kinds of glaze than was necessary for the baking of the raw pottery. Salt-glazing has been described above (p. 632), and is only used for the coarser sorts of ware.

6. Methods of Decoration.— In the ease of pottery decoration is usually applied on the biscuit-ware before it is glazed by the transfer-printing process. The required design is engraved on copper plates; the pigment is ground fine and mixed with a tenacious compound of oil and gums. An ordinary rolling press is used to print the engraved patterns in the oily pigment upon strips of tissue-paper, which are carefully applied and pressed face downwards on the biscuit-ware while the oil is yet wet; and so the pattern is transferred to the absorbent clay. This requires great dexterity from the difficulty there is in fitting the printed strips neatly on to curved surfaces. The paper is then washed off, and the printed ware is baked at a moderate temperature in what is called the “hardening” kiln, which is done before the glaze is applied, in order to drive off - the oily medium with which the pigment was mixed. The transfer process is quite fatal to all artistic beauty in the designs; it is hard, clumsy, and mechanical, the very opposite of a rational method for the decoration of pottery, which above all things demands freedom of hand and a spirited touch. Painted decoration which is executed by hand is now usually applied over the glaze, both because it is easier to do, not requiring so certain a touch, and also because the soft subdued colours of the under-glaze pigments do not suit the modern taste for what is bright and showy. The pigments used are necessarily oxides and salts of metals which will stand the heat of the kiln. * Only those few which can stand the very high temperature of the glazing kiln can be used under the glaze. The over-glaze colours, on the other hand, only need sufficient heat to fix them on the surface of the already fired glaze; and this is often done in a very slight and imperfect way. These colours not only lose in effect from want of the softening vitreous coat through which under-glaze colours are seen, but they are also very inferior through being unprotected, and therefore easily injured by scratches and ordinary wear. In old times the value of a protecting coat of glaze was so strongly felt that even paintings on enamel, like those on Persian pottery and Italian majolica, usually had a thin vitreous glaze added over the smooth enamel, with the double object of protecting the painting and increasing its soft richness of effect.

The discoveries of modern chemistry have added very greatly to the number of metallic salts which are available for the decoration of pottery. Almost every possible tint can be produced for overglaze painting. Oxides of cobalt are used for various shades of blue and grey up to black; antimony, usually combined with lead, gives yellow; oxides of copper give deep red or brilliant blues and greens according to the proportion of oxygen that they contain; oxide of chromium gives a good quiet green; manganese gives violet and even black; gold gives a fine ruby red; and uranium a rich orange. The various oxides of iron give a great variety of colours,—reds, yellows, and browns. Oxide of zinc is largely used, not as a pigment in itself, but in combination, to modify other colours. The oxides of iron, cobalt, and chromium give very stable colours, capable of bearing a very high temperature, and can therefore be used for under-glaze painting; most of the others can only be employed for over-glaze work. Over-glaze pigments cannot be used alone, but require a flux to make them combine with the glaze. Oxide of lead, borax, nitre, carbonates of potash or soda, and other substances are used for this purpose.

Literature.— English porcelain: Nightingale, Early English Porcelain, 1881; Binns, Potting in Worcester, 2d ed., 1877; Owen, Ceramic Art in Bristol, &c., 1873; Porter, Manufacture of Porcelain, <⅛c., 1832; Tiffin, Chronograph of Bow, Chelsea, and Derby Porcelain, 1875; Wallis and Bemrose, Pottery and Porcelain of Derbyshire, 1870; Jewitt, Ceramic Art of Great Britain, 1877,—the most complete and comprehensive work.

Museums illustrative of the General History of Pottery.— The Musée Céramique of Sèvres is the best and most complete for the student of all kinds of pottery. In England the Jermyn Street Museum of Geology has a small but very widely-illustrative collection of pottery and the various materials used in its manufacture. The South Kensington Museum is rich in almost all kinds of mediaeval and modern pottery, but it is unfortunately very badly arranged. The British Museum possesses a very large number of specimens of prehistoric pottery, Greek vases, mediaeval English, and very choice examples of Persian and majolica wares. The other chief European museums are mostly each rich in some special department of ceramic art.

General Literature on Pottery.— Brongniart, Traité des Arts Céramiques, 1854; Jacquemart, Histoire de la Céramique, 1873; Marryat, Pottery and Porcelain, 3d ed., 1868; Birch, Ancient Pottery, 1873; Catalogue of Pottery, Museum of Geology, Jermyn Street, 1876 (a very useful and well-illustrated work); Bonneville and Jaunez, Les Arts Céramiques, 1873; Brongniart and Riocreux, Musée de Sevres, 1845; Figuier, Les Merveilles de l’industrie, 1873-75; Greslou, Recherches sur la Céramique, 1864; Guillery, Les Arts Céramiques, 1854; Jacquemart, Les Merveilles de la Céramique, 1866-69; Magnier, Manuel du Porcelainier, Faïencier, &c., 1864; Mareschal, Les Faïences Anciennes et Modernes, 1867; Maze, Recherches sur la Céramique, 1870; Ris-Paquot, Histoire de la Faïence Ancienne, 1873-74; Salvetat, Leçons de Céramique, 1857; Waring, Ceramic Art in Remote Ages, 1875; Ziegler, Études Céramiques, 1850; Jannicke, Grundriss der Keramik, Stuttgart, 1879; Champfleury, Bibliographie Céramique, Paris, 1881 (gives a very large and complete list of works on pottery and porcelain, in all languages); Soden Smith, List of Works on Pottery and Porcelain in the Kensington Art Library, 1875.

On Pottery and Porcelain Marks the reader may consult Barth, Porzellan-Marken und Monogramme, 1873; Chaffers, Handbook of Marks and Monograms, 1874; Demmin, Guide de l'Amateur de Faïences et Porcelaines, 1873; Graesse, Guide de VAmateur de Porcelaine, &c., 1873; Palliser, The China Collector's Companion, 1874-75; Ris-Paquot, Dictionnaire des Marques et Monogrammes, 1874; Hooper and Phillips, Manual of Marks, 1876; Bowes, Japanese Marks, 1882. Many other lists of ceramic marks occur also in the various works mentioned under previous heads. (J∙ H. Μ.)