Italian Tin-Glazed Bowl

The tin-glazed bowl in Figure 1 is from Italy at the very end of the Medieval era, right around the turn of the 16th century. This bowl, as a result, exemplifies some of the best of what could be made with Medieval techniques, and these techniques drew significantly from various methods from the Islamic world. The glaze on this bowl is called majolica, and according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art description of the object, this example is “regarded as one of the most beautiful pieces of majolica ever made”, owing in large part to the highly intricate design on it. In particular, you can see a full range of colors on the bowl, and this improved substantially from the century before (McNab 2002).

Many of these developments in Majolica occured in Florence, which became a center for developing this technique in the late Medieval era (McNab 2002). However, the earlier techniques actually came from Islamic Spain, in the Middle East, and this process made its way to Europe through a variety of countries before ultimately reaching Italy. Moreover, these glazing techniques are similar to techniques for creating luster pottery from the Middle East, as you can see in the bowl in Figure 2. The critical aspect of these techniques is that they both involved using a significant amount of heat, along with certain metals, to create a glaze on the pottery objects. When luster began, it usually only had a few colors. Over time, this technique evolved significantly, and the majolica exemplifies this (McNab 2002).