ceramic history
The origin and ceramic history
The ceramics term drift from the Greek "kéramos", agrees all that is come true through the baking of the clay.
we can place the first period of the fabrication of the same one in the neolithic one.
This age is characterized for two fundamental aspects:
1) The vases shaped is gone through excavation of an argillaceous block and the construction through the system of the "colombino", that is a stamp in a container
2) covering lack (film mails for fine decorated on the surface).
Although they were not covered, prehistoric vases could however be decorates with several systems by painting, impression or incision.
Towards the 5000 a.c., it was begun to manufacture crokery with cooked clay. Terra-cotta vases were always shaped through the superimposition of strip of clay rods that, put one on the other formed the appearance of the object that agreed to realize.
These various parts, already knit between them, they came then amalgamated between smoothing down them and bathing them; then the vase came struck in order to render the strip more homogenous and in order to improve of the aspect they came smooth with straw, leaves or skins.
The decoration came painted on the vase with pigments drawn from colored lands, ocher, or impressing on the still fresh object small shells, seeds, realizing geometric designs through scratch with sharpened stones. In order to harden the objects, the prehistoric ceramist used furnaces constituted from simple holes in the land, that they came covered of leaves buckets and woods to which the fire hung. The temperature that was obtained was 500 degrees and it not guaranteed a perfect baking, moreover in this period did not exist a true market of the ceramics, therefore every village produced for them, how much it was necessary.
In Protostoric age two fundamental evolutions of the ceramics technology happen:
1) the invention of the lathe;
2) the invention of a varnish adapted to cover, the vases surface.
A slow progress regards also the furnaces, than thanks elevated temperatures are obtained more.
In the rooms of baking of the furnace abundant oxygen and the mineral contained in the pigment, transforming itself in oxide, stretching to blacken this vascular painting of dark color finds employment in the micenee cities, than towards the 700 a.C. it comes said black varnish technical with prevalence of geometric figures and it is distinguished from that one with red figures, that it consists in coloring the parts that encircle the figures realizing one fate of image in negative on the black background.
In the period of the high Middle Ages they circulate nearly exclusively ceramic crude, lacking in covering and the lack of a wider market determines the birth of regional production and tradition.
With the beginning of the low Middle Ages it resume the commerce in the Mediterranean and in Italy arrive the Tunisine ceramics, Moroccans, Egyptians who were inserted in the above all religious architectures.
Towards 1250 in great part of Italy the fabrication of the ceramics with enameled covering begins to practice itself, notes also like majolica.The first majolica produced in Italy is therefore the "archaic majolica". In the first phase the closed shapes predominate, the decoration are painted, with subjects of geometric type or inspire to compositions vegetables , after the 1400 the opened shapes predominate, and the decoration becomes rather monotonotes; while in the third phase it is stretched to add to the orange and yellow.It is introduced, then, the blue color, above all in the centers of the Romagna (Faenza), the Lazio (Viterbo), of the Umbria (Deruta) and of the Tuscany (Montelupo). With this technique, said "zaffera" the Tuscany ceramist imitated the language of the majolica of the Mediterranean orients (Syria and Egypt) which maintained to them an advantage thanks to the propriety of the metallic lustre, technical that is based on a third baking of the manifactures
Towards 1480, the pictorial representation becomes of of realistic type, so was born therefore renaissance decoration that will influence the production of Montelupo workshops until the productive crisis of 1620 that it reduced for an entire century the level of the Italian economy.
It was determined therefore a decrement in the number of workshops, and a worsening of the qualitative level of the productions.An incurable divorce between cheap. ceramics and baluable ceramics was born therefore. In the second half of the eighteenth century the income on the European market of English earthenwares produced with industrial criterion and to low cost will reduce in part this difference, this system will place aim to the small Italian handicraft removing also portions of market.