52.

Piatto scodelliforme 1515-20
h max 40 - Ø max 200 - Ø piede 83

Museo Archeologico e della Ceramica di Montelupo
(da scavo “pozzo dei lavatoi”)

Bowl shaped dish with a small brim with disc foot base; recomposed from fragments and integrated in form and decoration. Overall glazing extending to the back.

This atypically shaped bowl has a poppy flower motif on the border, similar to the one described above, and has a geometric pattern, made up of a series of interlacing threads, painted inside.

The main theme of the composition is the ‘knot’ motif, the same pattern which has been found in Italian art and decoration from the end of the 15th century (Bojani et alii n.d., p. 98, fig. 6), and which should be related to a symbolic motif of earlier Oriental matrix.

This kind of ‘knot’ decoration can, in fact, be found on the beams and bronzes resonant in Buddhist temples, especially on small pieces, and represents, through the constant intertwining of patterns, the idea of the infinite life of the soul moving from one body to another before its final liberation.

The ‘knot’ was one of the iconographic symbols of East Armenian religions, especially after its original meaning had been purged.

Painters in Montelupo did not perceive the original meaning, as they unheedingly put knots on the recurring shapes in a rhomboid cut on crosses. From this symbiosis a sort of lozenge appears with a rounded top (an ‘eye of the button’ at the top). Subsequently, the lozenge has been cut at the sides into segments, with some graphic curving connecting to the two ‘holes’. The parts shaping the ‘intertwining’ (often highly embellished) are usually connected to four of these elements and form a kind of cross shape, as in the bowl from the “pozzo dei lavatoi” (cf. Rackham-Mallet 1977, vol. 2, p. 32, no. 359) The earlier version of the Oriental ‘knot’ pattern, greatly differs in this example from the cursive and simplified decorations found in products from the Montelupo area made around the middle of the 16th century. This later pattern not only has a tighter, and more intertwined, knot as well as a more complex structure, but is inside by the means of scratching (“graffitura”) on the glaze. In earlier products, this ‘knot’ was wider and sometimes the pattern covered the whole surface of the maiolica. (Berti 1998, p. 151 and p. 311, tables 161-63; Berti 1986, pp. 88-90, fig. 36-38).

The relationship between a porcelain band in the traditional Oriental style centred on the poppy flower, and the intertwining of the Oriental ‘knot’ shows how these patterns were considered similar, and probably adapted, in compositions coloured in monochrome cobalt blue, which deliberately imitated the porcelain genre. No example, however, has yet been found to confirm a similar ensemble of motifs in Asian ceramics, even in the enamelled and “ingobbiate” forms which, in turn, imitated Chinese porcelain.

The making of this dish, can probably be attributed to the workshop of Lorenzo di Piero di Lorenzo, seeing that the best maiolica with scratched intertwining from the “pozzo dei lavatoi” carried his kiln mark (cf. Berti 1998, p. 311, tables 161-162). The specialisation of this craftsman in the production in “porcellana” technique is evinced by the fact that he made a supply with this type of decoration for Clarice Medici Strozzi in 1518 (Spallanzani 1984).
 

Bibliografia

Berti 1998, p. 310 tav. 160.