Project description
My PhD project is on The Workshop as a Site of Experiments and Failures. Ceramics in Istria in the 15th and 16th centuries. Istria is a region considered peripheral by mainstream art historical scholarship. During the investigated period, most of Istria belonged to the Venetian Republic, and culturally benefitted from the economic potential established thanks to the trade across the Mediterranean Sea. This financial stability seemed to have encouraged experiments with ceramics, documented since antiquity in cities such as Rovinj, Fažana and Pula. At the same time, more investigation is needed into the archives, and in particular into the customs books (registri delle dogane) and notarial records, which could give the sense of the scale of the goods produced internally in comparison to the merchandise brought from the Italian Peninsula. Because of this socio-economic context, the region is an ideal case-study for investigations of the impact of economic circumstances on the quality of ceramic production. Local studies have uncovered many interesting evidence of ceramic production, but this evidence remains fragmented and further investigation of this material, with a goal of formulating a coherent framework, is now timely and needed.
The making of ceramics is a complex process, as the artists had to rely on many variables, including the quality of clay bodies, pigments and glazes, and on the skill of professional kiln masters responsible for firing their ware. Cipriano Piccolpasso offers with his Li tre libri dell’arte del vasaio, a detailed explanation on how ceramics were made in the Renaissance period. Piccolpasso (1524 – 1579) writes in his three books about the process of pottery making, illustrated with many drawings for a better understanding. His drawings depict the production of ceramics in the artist’s workshops with artisans moving around busy spaces and and all the working tools, and other items required in the process. Piccolpasso’s treatise is a fundamental source for pottery making in the 16th century from a contemporary perspective.
I will look at artistic failures within this process of ceramic making, with artworks that did not turn out the way they were intended and how failure was an opportunity for improvement. Further, I will seek to reconstruct the mechanisms of sharing knowledge between various members of workshops active in Istria, to limit the risk of failures. Artistic failures dictated how to progress and as such became a part of the learning experience. Through analysis of the overlooked material, the project will describe failures as a common aspect of artistic production. As such, it will offer a radically new perspective in studies of Renaissance art and challenge the identification of the understudied with the unsuccessful. I am aiming to integrate failed experiments in the history of art while focussing on ceramics, which is typically neglected in canonical studies.
For this project, I will examine ceramic art objects in museums and other institutions on-site in Istria. I will be using an interdisciplinary methodology to analyse the artworks. Thereby, I will employ a mixed-methods approach. On the one hand, I will be using traditional art historical methods to reconstruct artistic practice in Istrian ceramic workshops at that time, considering the artisanal knowledge and experience the artists had of the complicated technique of pottery making. On the other hand, I will be doing physical analysis, including examinations with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), a non-invasive method to measure the material and pigments of ceramics. Using this method, I will understand the elemental composition of the glazes from 30 preselected objects in Istria, which would then be compared to similar measurements of ceramics from the Italian peninsula and other regions investigated by the “Artistic Failures in Renaissance Ceramics Workshops (AFIRE)” project- namely Moravia and Lesser Poland. The scope of these measurements is to verify whether the failures in the studied artefacts resulted from the poor execution of the process or from the materials used.
Further, I will consult secondary literature in reference libraries and analyse written primary sources from archives, like notarial records, workshop account books, documents of litigations between artists and patrons, and guild records to understand the socio-economic challenges the artists had to face for their ceramic production. I will approach this rich primary material, including the original ceramics on site, with specific research questions in mind. Firstly, what types of artistic provisions and improvements to the workshop organisation were introduced following technical failures? Secondly, what types of collaborative models were employed in different workshops to limit the risks involved in the production of the artworks? And thirdly, how often were failed objects used within the workshop as learning devices?
