The manufacture of porcelain in Europe has a history of very recent origin when compared with the long story of its invention and development in the land of its birth, but what it lacks in antiquity is atoned for by the interest and diversity of the vicissitudes through which it has passed. We can never know at what period and by whose agency the mysterious substance was first brought into Western lands. From the earliest records that can rightly be supposed to refer to it, we gather that the rare vessels of porcelain which found their way from China in the Middle Ages were regarded with superstitious wonder as the work of superhuman hands, to be treasured as jealously as gold or precious stones. How to rival this ware of pure white surface and translucent substance may well have been the problem that many a potter of those days attempted to solve, but it must have been the despair of the rudely-trained craftsmen whose hands shaped the rough stone-wares of the Rhineland, or the lead-glazed slip-wares, with their artless scratched or moulded designs, of mediæval France and Italy. The road to success was first opened by the potters of the last-named country. The Italian tin-enamelled maiolica, which attained its full development at the end of the fifteenth century, marks the first pronounced step in the advance. It derived its inspiration in the first instance not immediately from Chinese porcelain, but indirectly through the painted earthenware of the Near East and of the Moors in Spain, which was itself evolved in emulation of the Chinese wares. By the early years of the sixteenth century, the latter must have been quite familiar to the Italian maiolica potters, who used the term “alla porcellana” to denote a certain type of design in which they sought to imitate the contemporary Oriental “blue and white.”

The mere outward simulation that could be achieved by coating grey earthenware with pure white enamel did not satisfy the keen spirits of an age when every mind was pregnant with new ideas, and no task seemed too gigantic for the artist’s hand. To produce a body which, in substance and surface as well, should equal the object of imitation, must have been the aim of many a pioneer in the art of whose efforts all record has been lost.

If contemporary documents are to be trusted, it would appear that something in the nature of porcelain was made in Italy as early as the first quarter of the sixteenth century; it is not surprising to learn that the scene of the first successful experiments was Venice, a city by that time famous all over Europe for its glass, a substance for the manufacture of which its seaboard situation gave it exceptional advantages. Though the literary evidences for the fabrication are too clear to be reasonably doubted, no piece of this early Venetian porcelain is known to exist at the present day. We reach sure ground towards the end of the century, when we come to the porcelain invented at Florence about 1575 by Francesco de’ Medici, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany. This, the earliest European porcelain of which specimens still survive, is an imperfect artificial porcelain largely compounded of glass. It is mentioned in a letter dated 1576 by the Venetian ambassador at the Tuscan Court. The only dated specimen known is a flask with the arms of Philip II. of Spain and the date 1581, now in the museum at Sèvres. The Grand Duke probably ceased after a short time to take interest in the factory, and it became a private enterprise; of its subsequent fortunes something will be said on a later page.

While as regards material the object of emulation was Chinese porcelain, the forms affected by the Medici porcelain show little indication of extraneous influence. By their variety and by the gracefulness of many they bear witness to the taste and inventiveness of the ducal patron, who interested himself personally in the processes of fabrication and was doubtless in artistic matters the guiding spirit of the works. The decoration, painted in cobalt-blue usually of rather dull tone, either alone or outlined with pale manganese-violet, is of two distinct styles. One of these is made up of grotesques of the kind familiar in the later maiolica of the Urbino school. The other style is marked by Oriental motives, derived in some cases from Chinese, but more often from Near Eastern sources. The designs are never mere copies, but rather interpretations of their prototypes; often indeed they betray only slight traces of the inspiration to which they are due.

The last-named class of design is well exemplified by the bottle in Plate 10, one of the four pieces of Medici porcelain belonging to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The subtle shapeliness of the modelling and the ably-distributed painted ornament, in which a slight suggestion of the contemporary Chinese “blue and white” of Wan Li is perceptible, betoken the work of an artist whose conceptions were superior to the material at his disposal for their embodiment.

From the scanty documents that remain, it would appear that the venture of Francesco de’ Medici was abandoned for a time, and that his successor Ferdinand I. summoned to Florence one Niccolò Sisti for the purpose of re-establishing there the manufacture of porcelain. The kilns were later removed to Pisa, and a document exists to prove that in 1620 Sisti received monetary aid for his work from the then-reigning Grand Duke, Cosmo II. In the light of these records, meagre as they are, the greatest interest attaches to the little bowl figuring in Plate 11, one of the most precious documentary pieces of porcelain in the South Kensington collections; it was formerly in the possession of Mr. Henry Griffith and later belonged to Mr. Henry Willett of Brighton, on whose death it was acquired for the Museum. This bowl is of remarkably thin material, light to handle, and shows a somewhat yellow tone in the paste by transmitted light. The design painted round the outside consists of four alternate sprays of hyacinth and lily, separated by flowers resembling scabious or cornflower branching from a curved serrated leaf; these motives are obviously borrowed from the Turkish earthenware of the period. In a medallion inside the bowl is a view of a city with a domed building; on the bottom are the initials “G. G. P. F.” and the date 1638.

The only other piece hitherto identified as belonging to the same kind is another bowl, in the collection of Mr. Montague Yeats Brown. Like its companion, it is light in weight and thin in the walls. It is decorated round the sides externally and internally with a frieze of birds perched upon rocks; inside is a medallion with a group of ruins among trees, curiously anticipating the fanciful compositions seen on Worcester and Bow china of the eighteenth century. In the painting there appear in addition to cobalt-blue two colours of common occurrence in the maiolica of the Urbino school, a strong brownish-orange and a greenish-blue derived from copper, the latter much blurred in the firing. This bowl also bears a signature and date, “I. G. P. F. 1627”, and it is of extreme interest to observe that both bowls are marked with the same devices, a cross potent and a curious aggregation of strokes, of which the significance is difficult to determine; evidently these signs are the distinctive mark of the factory. The meaning of the initials is also uncertain, but in view of the known existence of the Sisti factory at Pisa a few years before the date on the earlier bowl, it may be conjectured that the last letters “P. F.”, occurring in both signatures alike, stand for “Pisanus fecit” or “Pisano fece”; if that be so, the preceding “G” may indicate the family name of the potters who took over from Sisti the secret of porcelain making, while the “I” and the first “G” respectively refer to the baptismal names of different members of the family. Be this as it may, these two bowls, unique in the nature of their paste and decoration and by reason of the dates they bear, are of the utmost interest as isolated landmarks in the history of European porcelain, standing midway between the production of Francesco de’ Medici and the earliest French achievements.

The Tuscan experiments above recorded were made at an unpropitious time, and were consequently destined to have no lasting effect in the development of European ceramics. Italy was then fast relapsing into the state of torpor which followed as a reaction from her restless activities in the age of the renaissance, and the time had not yet arrived when the influx of Chinese porcelain, resulting from the extension of trade relations with the East, was to spur on the potters and chemists of Europe, aided by royal patronage, to success in their efforts to produce a similar kind of ware. Porcelain is not heard of again in Italy till about 1720, when Francesco Vezzi, a Venetian goldsmith, in co-operation with a deserter from the Saxon royal factory, succeeded for a short time in producing hard porcelain of a type similar to that of Meissen. At a later date another Saxon workman named Hewelcke set up a short-lived factory in Venice, but no porcelain of importance was produced there till the establishment of the works of Geminiano Cozzi in 1765.

The chief Italian factory was that at Doccia near Florence, founded by the Marchese Carlo Ginori in 1735 and still kept up by his descendants. His aim was to compete with the porcelain imported from Saxony, and he succeeded in his efforts without the princely support by which alone in most European countries the manufacture was saved from failure. He obtained the assistance of an expert from the factory at Vienna, Carl Wendelin Anreiter, of whose painted work on porcelain rare specimens are occasionally met with. The earliest Doccia productions showed distinct signs of Meissen influence, as may be seen from a soup-bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum; this has a basket-work rim of the Meissen type, and is decorated with genre scenes from Italian peasant life in medallions, surrounded by tendrils in red and gold and small panels of lilac colour. Other pieces of the same service bear the mark of a Doccia painter, Pietro Fanciullacci. At a later stage the Ginori works became famous for their large reproductions in white porcelain of antique statues in the Florentine palaces, such as the Crouching Venus and the Apollo Belvedere.

The celebrated royal factory at Capodimonte, near Naples, is said to owe its origin to a present of Meissen porcelain made to Charles III., King of the Two Sicilies, in 1736, when he married the Saxon princess Maria Amelia. Its earliest productions were in white porcelain moulded with shells, coral, and other marine decorations, but its fame is more specially founded on the services with mythological subjects minutely picked out in enamel colours. As at Doccia, the inborn genius of the Italians for modelling was exhibited in figures and elaborate statuettes, in which drapery and flesh are usually tinted after nature. A characteristic example is a large allegorical composition at Kensington, supported on four figures copied from the crouching Turkish slaves (“I quattro Mori”) by Pietro Tacca, which surround the monument of Ferdinand I. of Tuscany in the harbour at Leghorn; modelling and colouring alike display the tendency to exaggeration and sensationalism characteristic of Italian art in the period of decadence. When Charles III. succeeded in 1759 to the throne of Spain, he removed with him to the palace of Buen Retiro, near Madrid, the whole establishment of his Neapolitan factory; the Madrid porcelain is of a similar kind to that made before the transfer of the works.

The later factory carried on at Naples under Ferdinand IV. shows the influence of the excavations at Herculaneum in the severe classical style by which it is marked. Painted views of the district of Naples and of the local antiquities are a favourite feature. At the same time the works gained some renown by the cleverly modelled statuettes in biscuit china of greyish tone made under the direction of Filippo Tagliolini.