ABSTRACT
This essay will discuss two sixteenth-century Italian documents relating to the manufacture of poĴery. The first, one of the most important manuscripts held in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the treatise entitled, in translation, The Three Books of the Art of the PoĴer. It was wriĴen and illustrated by Cipriano Piccolpasso (1523-79) and is now widely accepted as the first comprehensive account of the manufacture of any kind of poĴery ever produced in Europe.1 Designed by its author to celebrate and disseminate the processes and techniques of contemporary poĴery-making among ‘loĞy spirits and speculative minds’, it is by any reckoning a prestigious and important documentary source of historical evidence (see Illustration 8.1). Its author has variously been described as a ‘virtuoso gentleman’, a courtier, a ‘dileĴante’ artist and poet, a doctor of law – or medicine – a surveyor, topographer,
soldier, military engineer and Papal architect.2 Significantly, though it was unknown during his lifetime, by the mid eighteenth century this one work had singularly established Piccolpasso’s reputation as a courtier, a cavaliere and an ‘amateur poĴer’ and, since then, has been regularly and consistently cited in any discussion of the production of Italian Renaissance tin-glazed poĴery. Today, Piccolpasso’s manuscript is considered to be the authentic voice of the sixteenth-century Italian poĴer and such is his assumed authority that the treatise is frequently cited in highly technical physical and chemical analyses of Italian Renaissance poĴery-glaze and related technology.3 Thought to have been begun in 1556, its author’s tendency to re-write, edit and augment his text ensured that the treatise took some 19 years to complete.
