: Crisp, clear and stunningly colorful are the striking images
adorning the selection of Sixteenth Century Italian Renaissance
ceramics currently on view at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
at Vassar College. The exhibition "Marvels of Maiolica: Italian
Renaissance Ceramics from the Corcoran Gallery of Art" comprises
32 pieces of exquisite utilitarian items: plates and dishes,
apothecary jars, inkwells, devotional objects and other useful
articles dating from 1500 to the end of the century.
The rare selection of maiolica, on loan from the Corcoran's
William A. Clark Collection, and the Vassar College show, is
being presented in the first of a series of scheduled exhibitions
around the country.
Highly sophisticated and exquisitely painted tin-glazed
earthenware appeared in Italy in the late Fourteenth Century from
Moorish Spain, via the island of Majorca from which the art
derives its name, but varieties of it had been seen much earlier
in Babylon and Assyria. Maiolica in Italy (as opposed to the
"majolica" that appeared in England in the late Nineteenth
Century) was made from carefully prepared clay with tin glazing,
which produced an opaque white surface that could be elaborately
decorated.
