ITALIAN POTTERY

The first instance in which pottery attaches itself to a recognized school of art occurs in Italy. In merit and value it improves more upon this soil, where, treated by eminent hands, it became a vehicle of artistic expression, which has given it a value not inferior to canvases and frescos of the same period. While these latter are less available to foreign seekers, the beautiful vessels of pottery, with their decorations, as bright and fresh as when they first left the workman's hands, have found lodgment and appreciation in galleries distant from their native soil.

As early as the ninth century the Saracens had colonized in Sicily and Apulia, and they were expert potters. When expelled from the Spanish dependencies, they sought refuge in the Papal States. Italy had thus twice thrust upon her the opportunity of forming a practical acquaintance with the potter's art, but we have no substantial evidence of her real acceptance until two centuries after the introduction of the Moorish work-six hundred years after the arrival of the Saracens, so we take up the history where we may follow it with consecutive precision.

How the art of pottery-making was introduced into Italy is a question. That it came by the Moors there is no doubt; but vagarious as were their movements, there seems no certainty of its direct import.

An Italian antiquary of distinction, Passeri by name, claims the discovery and introduction of the ware for Pesaro. His claim is not well established, and the fact that every Latin country asserts the same individual distinction, adds to the doubt.

Still another and more valuable testimony is the fact that the first wares of Italy exhibited the splendid metallic lustre which identifies the Moorish work. This alone would seem to bespeak its Moorish extraction. The records of history itself almost decide the question.   

In the year A. D. 1113 the Crusader galleys departed from Pisa on their errand of deliverance. After various vexatious delays and mishaps, and a sanguine but victorious struggle at Ivica, they succeeded in reaching the little Island of Majorca, where the encroaching Moors had held in long and toilsome bondage their Christian brothers. Here the scenes of their former struggle were renewed, and the prisoners of the infidels released. Their work finished, the triumphant galleys returned to Pisa, laden with valuables and the products of art of their vanquished enemy. Probably not least among these were the tiles and plates which were most extensively produced at Majorca, and the poor prisoners who held the secret of their making. In the summer of the year 1115, the galleys reached their native port.  

That Majorca ware had even then become famous is evidently a fact, and Mr. Dawson Turner, writing from Pisa in the year 1825, says:

"After having returned to the conservatory the keys of the Campo Santo, he was kind enough to show me several specimens of plates from Majorca, imbedded in the walls of sundry churches in the city, to which they form singular ornaments. It was a custom at Pisa, with the warriors returning from the crusades, and stopping at Majorca, to bring home this peculiar earthenware, by way at once of testimony and trophy.