RuvidaMente
Anywhere in Italy, ceramic districts are thriving
while those that Italians are proud of are lacking.
Taking into consideration all the plastic and visual arts, ceramics is the only one that starts "from the bottom". While sculpture and painting, in any civilization, are born "from above", to represent or glorify a character, an event, a divinity, a hero, a saint, a possession, a conquest, ceramics were born to solve the problem of an ordinary person, such as the need to collect water from a puddle, provide support for food to eat, transport and preserve a liquid, a fluid, an ointment, grains, a flour.
While sculptures and paintings adorn the homes of the powerful, the seats of governments and churches, ceramics are in the homes
and, at most, in the apothecary's and pharmacist's shops.
In addition, it should be emphasized that the ductility of clay has allowed this material to enter immediately, perhaps through the back door, even in the workshops of great sculptors, because there is no great work of stone, marble or bronze that has not first been modeled in clay until it reaches, test after test, its final form and, therefore, worthy of being made by working on a material considered "nobler".
NO PAINTINGS AND LOTS OF BOWLS
In the not too distant past, in the homes of our grandparents and great-grandparents, of any of us, there were rarely paintings and sculptures (sometimes a Crucifix and a portrait of the Madonna) but certainly plates, bowls, vases, jugs, amphorae abounded.
This has given the opportunity to ceramics to take, in its evolution, two different and parallel paths:
- on the one hand, devoting oneself to functionality, stimulating potters and potters in search of increasingly efficient and at the same time pleasant shapes
- on the other hand, to devote oneself to preciousness, that is, once the form has been decided, to leave the field free to decorators and painters so that they could make that form even richer and more attractive.
As in all evolutionary paths, each ceramic production district has taken different paths, sometimes favoring high craftsmanship
and the cult of the unique piece (as in Capodimonte) with the risk of turning on themselves and losing sight of market changes and new consumer
sentiments, other times masking behind craftsmanship a slow but irreversible process of industrialization (as in Deruta) that ends up being only self-referential, other times decisively
embracing the path of industrial production (as in the case of Richard-Ginori) and, running after the needs of turnover, thus losing part of its soul.
The fact remains that, traveling the length and breadth of Italy, in practically every region you can come across artisan and industrial ceramic districts, all
autonomous and with a long history behind them. While there is no comparable proliferation of painting and sculpture districts, the two "arts" of which Italy is very proud.
CERAMICS AND TERRACOTTA IN
[Abruzzo•Basilicata] [Calabria•Campania] [Emilia•Latium•Liguria]
[Lombardy•Marches] [Piedmont•Apulia] [Sicily•Tuscany]