Il Risorgimento della maiolica italiana: Ginori e Cantagalli

 If the story of the maiolica of the Italian Renaissance constitutes one of the great chapters in world ceramic art history, the story of the revivalist maiolica made in the second half of the nineteenth century is an eloquent and fascinating epilogue to it, with its own historical context and artistic standing. This revival was inspired both by the desire of Italians of the generations that achieved the Risorgimento to recreate the glories of Italian Renaissance art and by the profits to be made, in view of the enormous prices paid by British, French, Russian, and, rather later, German and American collectors for major sixteenth-century pieces. It is no coincidence that in 1856, the well-informed J.C.Robinson opined that Renaissance maiolica prices had risen twenty fold in the previous five years; and that these very years are the key period in the initial development of revivalist maiolica.Although other centres – one thinks of Pesaro, Faenza, GualdoTadino, Gubbio, Siena, Bologna and Faenza – were energetic in their own more or less imitative revivals, Florence, with its unequalled artistic traditions and its large and culturally active community of temporary visitors and permanent residents from northern Europe, was a focus of the international art market and became the greatest powerhouse of the maiolica revival.This exhibition and its well-produced catalogue deal with and counterpoint the two great Florentine firms – the historic porcelain firm founded at Doccia in1737 and run by successive generations of the Marchesi Ginori, which started making “artistic maiolica” around 1854; and the maiolica enterprise created about 1878, on the basis of an earlier family firm, by Ulisse Cantagalli (1839- 1901). The project has been sponsored as part of the programme of Piccoli, Grandi Musei by the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, one of those bank foundations that continue to make such a vast and serious – and, to foreigners, enviable – contribution to Italian cultural life. The exhibition includes works from museums in England and France and from private collections in Italy and abroad, providing a well-rounded picture of the finest production of both factories.The location of the exhibition is the most appropriate possible: Frederick Stibbert (1838-1906) was a friend of Ulisse Cantagalli and the evocative Museo Stibbert contains probably the largest and most spectacular public collection of Cantagalli maiolica anywhere. It was acquired directly from the factory by Stibbert, and culminates in the magnificent copies of the roundels of the Months which had been made by Luca Della Robbia for the Palazzo Medici and acquired by J.C. Robinson for the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museumin1861; these copies were made by Cantagalli for Stibbert about 1893, from drawings made in South Kensington. Stibbert’s Cantagalli is here described by the Museo Stibbert’s curator Dominique-Charles Fuchs.The existing studies of the two firms have previously been different in type. Students of Cantagalli have since 1990 been able to consult a ground-breaking full-length study written by Giovanni Conti, with the collaboration of Gilda Cefariello Grosso. The authors of the essays and catalogue entries in the present catalogue have been able to study the enormous archive of drawings and related illustrations (though with disappointingly few written documents) in the Fondo Cantagalli archive, acquired in 1983 for the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza. Although this material had been discovered by and used by Conti, whose work remains fundamental, it has not been generally available since; the admirable collaboration of the Faenza museum, Friends of Doccia and Osservatorio dei Mestieri d’Arte in digitizing and making available to contributors to the present catalogue this vast body of material has been an important contribution to the research behind the present exhibition, and several of the drawings are exhibited. It is to be hoped that in the fullness of time some of the written archival material relating to the firm’s history which is still missing may join the Fondo Cantagalli.The archive shows the range of material tapped by Ulisse’s craftsmen, from metalwork to fresco painting, as well as Renaissance ceramics, and from the Bargello and the Uffizi to the museums of London and elsewhere, as well as a wide range of illustrated publications and commercially-made photographs. The eclectic and international range of sources adopted by factory artists is shown, for instance, by a plate, no. 28 in the catalogue, of 1879-1880 (an early piece of Ulisse’s production): the central scene of Diana and Endymion is after a Cafaggiolo plate now in the Gulbenkian Museumin Lisbon, but then in the Basilewski collection; the artist copied the chromolithograph in Darcel and Delange’s Recueil de faïences italiennes of 1869. The border is from the chromolithographed illustration of an unrelated, putatively Sienese (but more probably Faentine), plate in C.D.E. Fortnum’s South Kensington Museum catalogue of 1873.Ulisse’s wife, Margaret Tod, who was actively involved in the business, was a Scot and he had many English friends and clients. The “British connection” is a theme here particularly developed in the essays by Dora Thornton and Justin Raccanello.Ulisse’s talents as a networker and marketer of his wares internationally are also evident throughout. One indication of this is in Australia: though Cantagalli had not exhibited at the Melbourne exhibitions in 1880 or 1888, it was Cantagalli products that the museums in both Melbourne and Sydney selected, when, in the spirit of the South Kensington Museum, they sought in 1895-1897 and 1904 respectively to document Italian Renaissance maiolica by acquiring modern copies.Studies of nineteenth-century Ginori artistic maiolica exist, but they are more scattered and piecemeal than those on Cantagalli. Furthermore, while Cantagalli maiolica is almost always marked and can rarely have been sold to deceive, the early history of Ginori revivalist maiolica is complicated and rendered shadowy by the involvement of the Florentine dealer Giovanni Freppa, who in the early 1850s commissioned from Ginori workmen reproductions of sixteenth-century originals and sometimes marketed the mas genuine Renaissance works. The exposure of Freppa’s nefarious but in some degree creative (since it played a key part in the rediscovery in Italy of reduced metallic lustre in the Renaissance manner) activity was sensational. A leading role in unmasking him was played by no less a figure than the French novelist George Sand: in an essay written in June 1855 she praised Freppa while mildly but unequivocally denouncing him as a diffuser of fake she had himself commissioned.The present volume presents for the first time, in essays by Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti, by Raffaella Ausenda, and by Rita Balleri and Oliva Rucellai, supplemented by admirably informative catalogue entries, a fully-researched, contextualized, and coherent account of Ginori maiolica in the brief “Freppa period” (though some aspects of this remain murky) and afterwards. The accounts of individual artists working at Ginori in the essay by Balleri and Rucellai are based on meticulous archival research in the Doccia archives and add substantially to previous knowledge.The items selected for exhibition have been well and seriously chosen, starting with two key historic documents. The plate here illustrated was exhibited by Freppa, under his own name, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855 and acquired by what was shortly to become the South Kensington Museum as having been “manufactured by Freppa of Florence”. The next item in the catalogue is a lustred plate presented the same year by Marchese Lorenzo Ginori Lisci to the Museum at Sèvres; this group at Sèvres constitutes the earliest known datable examples of the lustre revival in Italy. The range of late maiolica shown is comprehensive and exhilarating – from istoriato to grotesque-painting; from subjects after Benozzo Gozzoli and Botticelli to maiolica versions of the work of post-Renaissance artists; from Iznik and Hispano-Moresque to what is in England called Art Nouveau and in Italian called stile Liberty; from direct copies of Renaissance models to fantastical new creations reminiscent of the so-called “Majolica” (which despite its name was not tin-glazed earthenware) made since about 1850 by English companies like Minton.The catalogue is bilingual throughout and it is a pleasure to note the professionalism of the English translations (by Anna Moore Valeri) – which is in refreshing contrast to the truly embarrassing translations into English of Italian exhibition texts which have been provided in recent years to exhibition organizers and publishers by some Italian translation companies.This is a thoroughly admirable exhibition, with a lucid, handsome, substantial, and reasonably-priced catalogue that will long remain indispensable to the study of the subject. It reflects the greatest credit on the co-ordinators and on the international team involved.