Our collection includes several plates, dishes, and other objects decorated with portraits of beautiful women. Golden haired and dark eyed, these 'belle donne' appear against deep blue backgrounds, accompanied by winding scrolls and a description – most frequently 'bella', beautiful, but sometimes other qualities like 'gratiosa', graceful, 'pulita', pure, or 'diva', divine. Some examples forgo the portrait altogether and simply include a name and the letter 'b' for bella.
Despite sometimes including names, these portraits were probably not intended to faithfully depict living women. Instead, they are 16th-century Italian fantasies of beauty, recreating an ideal that was celebrated across art and literature of the era. Most likely, 'belle donne' plates functioned as personalised love tokens within courtship and marriage rituals in early modern Italy, gifted by a man to his betrothed, or by an admirer to his admired. Small holes in the rims or feet of several of these dishes suggest that they could be suspended on the wall for display.
This kind of Italian earthenware is known as maiolica and is celebrated for its rich colours and pictorial decoration. The earthenware is first covered in a tin-glaze, which creates an opaque white surface onto which coloured pigments are painted. The pigments and glaze fuse together when the piece is fired, preserving the vibrancy of the colours. This technique of glazing has its origins in eighth-century Iraq and spread across the Mediterranean with the Islamic empire. In the 12th century, Islamic Spain became a centre for its production – the term maiolica evolved from 'Majolica', the Italian name for Majorca, a Spanish island which was an important trading port between Spain and Italy during the late medieval period. By the 16th century, Italy's manufacture of maiolica was in full swing and whole towns were dedicated to ceramic production, including Urbino, Faenza, and Deruta.
Like any art object, 'belle donne' maiolica reflects the society in which it was made. Marriage was a serious business in early modern Italy. Particularly for the middle and upper classes, marriage meant the transfer and accumulation of social status and wealth. Yet before 1563, there was no specific church or state-mandated wedding ceremony. Weddings could be quite informal or even spontaneous, which left room for doubt over the legitimacy of the union. Formal gift giving during betrothal was therefore not only a way to flaunt a family's wealth, it also publicly asserted the existence of the marriage itself.
Different cities in Italy maintained differing customs for marriage. In Florence, special significance was attached to the 'impalmamento', a ritual in which the groom brought gifts to the bride's home, and a contract was signed. To affirm the contract, the couple clasped hands – a symbolic display of 'fede', faith. Imagery of two clasped hands is found on Renaissance rings and maiolica dishes, another example of how material objects cemented a wedding's validity.
Early modern Italian beliefs around beauty were quite different from today's. Inspired by a revival of ancient Greek philosophy, beauty was considered an outward manifestation of inner goodness, rather than just a physical condition. Gifts of 'belle donne' upheld and projected a feminine ideal to which young women were taught to aspire – modest, graceful, beautiful, chaste. Needless to say, the patriarchal society of Renaissance Italy did not consider individualism especially important in a young wife. Examples of 'belle donne' maiolica with empty scrolls left for inscriptions suggest that the purchaser could pick from a range of beautiful women, and simply ask for the name of his beloved to be filled in, along with an appropriate quality.
'Belle donne' maiolica also upheld established ideas around love, courtship, and feminine virtue in early modern Italy. Dramatically pierced or bleeding hearts are common, indicating a preoccupation with the notion of 'sweet suffering' and the emotional turmoil wrought by love. Writing in 1503, the Venetian poet Pietro Bembo concluded that love will bring "most uncertain unhappiness and misery", and compared its dual nature to fire – both beautiful and painful. Like many other contemporary writers, Bembo was inspired by the romantic sonnets of Petrarch, a 14th-century Italian poet, who wrote: "blessed be the first sweet agony I felt when I found myself bound to Love, the bow and all the arrows that have pierced me."
Petrarch and his followers promoted an unattainable ideal of the perfect woman: beautiful, virtuous, and not infrequently, dead. Petrarch yearns for his beloved, Laura – who has few specific attributes bar being fair-haired and modest – even after her death. Another celebrated writer of the Italian Renaissance, Angelo Poliziano, immortalised and idolised the lovely Simonetta, a character based on an actual woman, Simonetta Vespucci, who was revered as a famed beauty in Florence and died in 1476 aged only 22.
This lingering obsession with tragically thwarted love and dead beautiful women permeates 'belle donne' iconography. The inscription on one example reads, 'A fair death makes honourable a whole life', another 'Death alone quenches true love.' These ominous assertions accompany somewhat sorrowful looking women, who resemble the blonde Virgins and goddesses populating paintings by the likes of Perugino, Pinturicchio, and Botticelli. Elaborate designs like these were sometimes transferred to the surface of the pottery with a stencil technique known as 'pouncing'. Tracing paper is first laid over the original image, often a print or a drawing, and the design is outlined with pin pricks. The tracing paper is then placed on the pottery, and gently rubbed with a cloth pouch filled with charcoal, which transfers the image to the earthenware surface below.
Men sometimes make fleeting cameos within this category of maiolica dishes. Unsurprisingly, these men are not described as graceful, pure, or beautiful, and are also more likely to be identified with full names. Depicted on a dish produced in the Urbino area in 1559 is 'Francesco di Lorenzo', holding a small bunch of flowers which are perhaps meant to hint at his romantic inclinations. Maybe these men are hopeful suitors, or grooms to be? This is the case for a large and particularly beautiful maiolica floor tile, decorated with a profile portrait of a young man. An inscription in his cap, alluding to his betrothal, likely reads, 'To be given into the hand of Zovano'. The tile was commissioned for a pavement in the Convento di San Paolo in Parma around 1471 – 82, perhaps offering historical precedent for painted portraits of young, male suitors on 16th-century maiolica.
Other examples depict couples, with various inscriptions that again imply the paradoxical nature of love. Behind one amorous pair unfurls a scroll with the motto 'Dulce est Amare', love is sweet. The man holds a red carnation, a flower commonly associated with betrothal. A second, presumably less blissful, pair are accompanied by an inscription reading 'Amore Ingrato', ungrateful love.
Another couple appears in a very different format on a plate produced in 1510 near Florence, painted by a master of maiolica decoration, Maestro Jacopo. It is a rare example which reveals the method of its own creation – at the left, a maiolica artist paints in blue on a white glazed plate. Before him sit an upper-class couple in elegant clothing, as if he is about to take their portraits. It is very unlikely that maiolica artists completed portraits from life in this way. However, this unusual decoration illustrates the symbolic rather than literal relationship between the 'belle donne' portrayed on maiolica plates, and the women who received them as tokens of love. The painted couple could metaphorically represent an actual couple who were recently betrothed, and the gift of the plate might act as a tangible record of their union. Both parties are present, and both parties are – hopefully – in love.
