That's Arte!
Italian pottery
The local clay from Deruta, a hill town and comune in the Province of Perugia in the Umbria region of central Italy, is good for ceramics, whose production began in the Early Middle Ages, but found its artistic peak in the 15th and early 16th century, with highly characteristic local styles, such as the "Bella Donna" plates with conventional portraits of beauties, whose names appear on fluttering banderoles with flattering inscriptions.
The lack of fuel enforced low firing temperatures, but from the beginning of the 16th century, Deruta compensated with its metallic lustre glazes in golds and ruby red. In the 16th century Deruta produced the so-called "Rafaellesque" ware, decorated with fine arabesques and grottesche on a fine white ground.
Deruta, with Gubbio and Urbino, continues to produce some of the finest Italian majolica.
Tiziana and Manuela, share a taste for good food and country living and they founded thatsArte.com, a website dedicated to Italian ceramics from Tuscany, Umbria and Sicily. They spend time traveling around the best known Italian ceramic centers – which are also some of the prettiest small medieval cities – scouting for new bright artists.
They exclusively focus on the very finest Italian artistic majolica: hand made and hand painted with the same process used centuries ago. They look for style, history but also a touch of innovation.
Visit the website
The Renaissance
It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art.
Nothing notable was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art.
If the methods of science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a like controlling influence.
Not only was each department of the fine arts practiced with singular success; not only was the national genius to a very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone would imply.
It possessed the Italians in the very center of their intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point of view.
We see this in their literature. It is probable that none but artistic natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance.
Critics, endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to harmony of form than the Italians complain that their poetry lacks substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano.
We then perceive that these poets were not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain circle of effects.
They subordinated their work to the ideal of their age, and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might successfully aspire.
The Renaissance is said to begin in 14th century Italy. The rediscovery of Ancient Greek and Roman art and classics brought better proportions, perspective and use of lighting in art. Wealthy families, such as the Medicis, and the papacy served as
patrons for many Italian artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Donatello, and Raphael.
The focus of most art remained religious. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, and sculpted his famous Pietà, Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Raphael painted several Madonnas. Both Michelangelo and Donatello sculpted
visions of David.
Read Italian art and the artists of Italy
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