Ewer of soft-paste porcelain painted in blue, Florence, 1575-1587.

Pear-shaped ewer of soft-paste porcelain, with expanding neck pinched up in front to form a lip, double snake-shaped handle, with a tie round the middle. Painted in blue with palmette-flowers and foliage on wavy stems springing from the base. Painted on the base is the letter ‘F’ with the Dome of Florence’s cathedral. The piece betrays its experimental character and the lower part of the body of the jug is slanted downwards towards the base during the firing process. The handle recalls the shapes of contemporary Italian maiolica.

J.H. Fitzhenry Esq. in deposit to the museum from 1903, bought in 1914 (for 200 Pounds) together with the rest of the Fitzhenry Collection.

'Medici Porcelain' was created in Florence for the Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici from around 1575 until soon after his death in 1587.
His father Cosimo I (1519-74) grandson of Lorenzo de' Medici, established his power as Duke of Florence and after 1569 as Grand Duke of Tuscany. He gathered around him all the leading artists of the late Renaissance in Florence.
One of them, Bernardo Buontalenti (1536-1608) was the supervisor of all artistic undertakings at the Florentine court and must have played an important role also in the making of porcelain. In 1568 Vasari wrote that: "In a short time he (Bernardo) will be seen making vessels of porcelain'.
It is around the same time, that the first attempts to make porcelain must have started.
Medici porcelain was created almost under laboratory conditions in a special workshop located in the Boboli Gardens of Palazzo Pitti. Most of the makers had been trained in maiolica workshops, like Flaminio Fontana, from the well-known potters family from Urbino, who received payment for firing twenty-five to thirty pieces of porcelain in Florence in 1578. Almost all known pieces betray an experimental character by some kind of technical defect.
Medici porcelain is not a 'real' hard-paste porcelain but a soft-paste or 'artificial' porcelain. It combines marzacotto (a heated frit mixture of sand, wine lees (sediments), and salt) with fine white sand and white clay. It was biscuit-fired at ca. 1100 C and subsequently the pieces were painted and glazed and fired again at 900-950 C. It was close in composition to the Isnik wares made in Turkey, Persia and elsewhere in the Islamic Near East.
In 1575 Andrea Gussoni, the Venetian ambassador to Florence, wrote that the Grand Duke Francesco I had rediscovered the method of making Indian (i.e. Oriental) porcelain and that he had spent ten years before finding the secret, thanks to a 'Levantine'; probably a Greek or Turk familiar with Isnik potteries.
It was not until the 1709 that 'real' hard-paste porcelain was first produced in the West by Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719) at Meissen.

The mark underneath the base; 'F' with the Dome of Florence Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, belongs to a small Florentine workshop run by the Medici family between 1578 and 1587. The mark, painted in the same underglazed blue as the painted decoration, appears in a number of different variations.

Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, was an avid collector of Chinese porcelain, which was at the time a great rarity in Europe. He set up a special workshop in the Boboli gardens of the Pitti Palace, where a small team of artisans and scientist attempted to unravel the formula for porcelain. With the help of a potter from the East the workshop managed to produce a material based on fine clay and ground glass, which was equally white but lacked the translucency of real porcelain. Technically this 'Medici porcelain', is much closer to Turkish fritware imitations of porcelain. Greatly prized at the time, fewer than a hundred examples of 'Medici porcelain' survive today. Many of these, like this slumped jug, show technical defects associated with a small and experimental production.

C.128-1914