The Decorations of Faenza Ceramics: From Renaissance Imagery to Contemporary Practice

Look closely at a Faenza ceramic and the surface begins to open up.

A painted figure sits inside a border of leaves. A grotesque face emerges from foliage. A blue-grey ground changes the way a flower or a figure catches the eye. An inscription identifies a person, a workshop or a date. Elsewhere, the decoration is reduced to a few swift strokes, leaving large areas of white glaze untouched.

These details belong to different moments and visual traditions, but they have something in common: they were choices.

Faenza’s ceramic decoration developed through a changing repertoire of images, patterns and ways of organising a surface. Some elements came from the Renaissance fascination with classical antiquity; others reflected Byzantine, Islamic and East Asian traditions. Printed images supplied painters with compositions that could be adapted to ceramics, while textiles, metalwork and imported porcelain offered further models.

The result was never a single Faenza style.

A surface made of borrowed languages

Faenza did not develop its decorative vocabulary in isolation.

Early local ceramics used relatively restrained combinations of green, brown and, more occasionally, blue. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Faenza workshops were working with a considerably broader repertoire, incorporating motifs and approaches connected with medieval ornament, Byzantine and Islamic traditions, Far Eastern ceramics and the visual culture of Renaissance Italy. The collections of the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza preserve this succession of influences across centuries of local production.

The movement of images was particularly important.

Renaissance artists had access to engravings and other printed sources, and ceramic painters could adapt compositions originally intended for paper or painting. A scene might therefore begin in one artistic context and reappear, transformed, on the curved surface of a plate or bowl.

That helps explain the richness of Renaissance maiolica. A single object can contain several histories at once: the history of the workshop that made it, the history of an image borrowed from elsewhere, and the history of the person who commissioned or used it.

The surface is where those histories meet.

When the whole vessel becomes a composition

One of the most effective ways Renaissance painters organised a ceramic surface was through compartments.

The a quartieri scheme divided the body of a vessel into distinct areas filled with foliage, grotesques, masks, trophies or other ornaments. Instead of allowing the decoration to spread evenly, the painter established a hierarchy of border, compartment, central field and medallion.

A sixteenth-century albarello in the MIC collection makes the structure easy to see. Its tall cylindrical body is broken into ornamental zones filled with scrolling foliage, acanthus leaves and grotesques. In the centre, Alexander the Great appears on horseback. The painted scene is framed by the surrounding ornament rather than isolated from it.

The shape of the vessel matters here.

An albarello is not a flat picture. Its surface curves away from the viewer, so the painter has to organise the decoration around a changing line of sight. The compartments help keep the composition legible as the vessel is turned in the hand.

Grotesques and the Renaissance imagination

Among the most recognisable elements of Renaissance ornament are the grottesche: fantastic combinations of foliage, masks, animals, human figures and imaginary creatures.

The word refers to an ornamental language rediscovered in Renaissance Italy through the study of ancient Roman decorations found in excavated structures described as grotte. Artists adapted these ancient forms into a new vocabulary of ornament.

On ceramics, the grotesque was remarkably adaptable.

A small creature could sit between two leaves. A mask could occupy the centre of a scroll. A human figure could emerge from a stem or become part of an imaginary architectural arrangement.

The effect is often lighter than the solemnity of Renaissance narrative painting suggests. A heroic or biblical scene might be surrounded by a world of playful, hybrid forms.

The Renaissance plate as a picture

Then there are ceramics in which the image takes over the surface.

The istoriato tradition brought narrative painting to maiolica on an unprecedented scale. Mythological stories, biblical episodes and scenes from ancient history could be arranged across plates and bowls, often with ornamental borders framing the main action.

One of the MIC’s particularly revealing objects is a bowl depicting the Sacrifice of Marcus Curtius, made in the workshop of Pietro Bergantini and dated 17 June 1529.

The Roman hero appears at the centre, riding towards the chasm that, according to Roman legend, opened in the Forum. Around him are trophies and grotesques. On the foot of the bowl, an inscription identifies the subject, workshop and date.

Look at the object as a whole and the distinction between painting and pottery becomes less useful.

The scene has perspective and figures, but it also has a rim, a foot and a curved body. The painted narrative changes as the vessel changes orientation. The image belongs to the object rather than simply being applied to it.

This is what makes istoriato ceramics so compelling: they occupy the space between picture and vessel.

The border does more than frame the picture

It is natural to look first at the central scene.

The border deserves the same attention.

Renaissance ceramic painters filled borders with acanthus, scrolling foliage, flowers, trophies, masks, animals and geometric divisions. These elements could be repeated, mirrored or combined to establish a rhythm around the main image.

The border also changes how the centre is perceived.

A densely ornamented frame can make a narrative scene feel more theatrical. A restrained border gives it more visual space. A field of foliage can connect the central image to the rest of the vessel rather than allowing it to float like a miniature painting.

On some objects, the border is so inventive that the eye moves back and forth between the supposed centre and its surroundings.

Motifs that became signatures

Over time, individual motifs became recognisable elements of the ceramic vocabulary.

The MIC’s collections include examples described as occhio di penna di pavone, the eye of a peacock feather; palmetta persiana, the Persian palmette; foglia accartocciata, the curled leaf; and alla porcellana, a decorative manner inspired by the appearance of imported porcelain.

These names reflect the way recurring decorative forms have been identified and classified within the Faenza ceramic tradition.

They also reveal how workshop decoration could be assembled from a repertoire of recognisable forms. A painter did not necessarily invent every leaf, flower or scroll anew. A familiar motif could be enlarged, repeated around a rim, compressed into a narrow band or used to fill a space beside a figure.

The vocabulary was shared, but its arrangements could be individual.

This is one reason historical ceramics reward close looking. Repetition does not necessarily mean mechanical sameness. Small differences in the length of a stroke, the angle of a leaf or the spacing between motifs remain visible.

Blue grounds and the character of berettino

Sometimes the most important decorative decision is the colour beneath the decoration.

Berettino is a grey-blue glaze associated particularly with Renaissance Faenza. It could be used as a monochrome ground or as the background for blue, white and polychrome ornament.

Against a white ground, a painted blue line is crisp and immediate. Against berettino, the same colour can become deeper and more atmospheric. White highlights stand out differently; foliage seems to recede into the glaze; the painted surface and the ground begin to work together.

The glaze also interacts with light.

Turn a vessel slightly and the surface changes. A blue-grey field that seemed flat from one angle catches the light differently from another. Brushwork becomes more or less visible. Relief and painted line begin to overlap.

Colour is therefore part of the structure of the decoration, not merely its palette.

When the image became quieter

Around the middle of the sixteenth century, Faenza developed another distinctive decorative language in the bianchi di Faenza.

Here the white glazed surface dominates. Decoration becomes more economical, often consisting of rapid strokes and small areas of colour in the manner known as compendiario. The MIC describes this approach as a synthetic style in which decoration is reduced to essential brushwork.

The effect can be surprisingly modern.

A flower may be suggested by a handful of lines. A small figure sits within a large field of white. A border appears almost weightless against the glaze.

White is no longer simply the ground on which decoration happens. It is part of the composition itself.

This is particularly apparent when the form of the vessel is elaborate. The eye moves between the sculptural silhouette and the few painted marks that articulate it. Decoration and shape share the work.

When Renaissance decoration returned

Decorative languages do not disappear when their historical moment ends.

During the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italian ceramic workshops repeatedly looked back to earlier styles. The MIC describes nineteenth-century production in particular as strongly eclectic, with a widespread revival of themes from earlier centuries, especially sixteenth-century maiolica. Faenza developed a particularly pictorial form of ceramic painting during this period.

The revival could be extraordinarily elaborate.

The MIC’s nineteenth-century collections include an oval wall piece by Achille Farina, alongside works such as Amore e Psiche, amphorae and decorated services. These objects reveal a nineteenth-century fascination with historical ornament, pictorial effects and the decorative richness associated with earlier periods.

The past had become material for a new kind of virtuosity.

A Renaissance grotesque revived in the nineteenth century was no longer simply a Renaissance grotesque. It was a nineteenth-century interpretation of what Renaissance decoration was supposed to look like.

The distinction matters because historical revival is itself a historical style.

The hand remains visible

The most attentive way to look at a painted ceramic is to move closer than the overall composition requires.

A row of leaves may reveal slight changes in pressure. A line that appeared uniform from a distance becomes thicker at one end. A flower is not perfectly centred. A wash of colour stops a fraction short of the line beneath it.

These details are small, but they are part of the character of hand-painted ceramics.

They also explain why two objects using the same repertoire can feel different. A workshop could repeat a decorative scheme, yet each painter interpreted it through a particular rhythm of line and brush pressure.

What happens to decoration in contemporary Faenza?

The contemporary ceramic scene in Faenza no longer depends on the Renaissance repertoire, but it retains the same fascination with the surface as a place for experimentation.

The MIC’s contemporary collection makes that shift visible. Its twenty-first-century displays bring together artists working from very different positions, including Nero, Wei Bao, Yves Malfliet, Sissi, Salvatore Arancio, Paivi Rintaniemi, Bertozzi & Casoni and Kathy Ruttemberg. The museum presents these works in dialogue across materials, artistic approaches and generations.

One recent example is Léa Renard’s Subtle Conversations of States of Mind, awarded in the 2025 Faenza Prize for artists under 35. The jury highlighted the dialogue between forms, glazes and textures, as well as the work’s use of colour and contemporary trompe-l’œil.

Another 2025 award winner, Hanna Miadzvedzeva’s November, was recognised for the apparent simplicity of its surface alongside its technical complexity and its references to nature and landscape.

Neither work needs to reproduce a Renaissance motif to belong to the wider history of Faenza ceramics.

The question is no longer simply whether a motif belongs to the Renaissance repertoire. It is what the artist can make the surface do.

Colour, glaze, texture, relief and illusion can now become the principal subject. The ceramic surface may represent something recognisable, suggest a landscape, create an optical effect or resist representation altogether.

The vocabulary has changed. The attention to the surface remains.

Learning to look at a Faenza ceramic

The next time you encounter one, start before trying to identify it.

Look at the composition. Is there a central scene, or does the ornament spread across the whole vessel?

Follow the border. Does it frame the image, divide the surface or create a rhythm of its own?

Look for repeated motifs: leaves, flowers, palmettes, feathers, masks, grotesques, trophies.

Then look at the ground. White? Blue-grey? Coloured? Is the decoration painted densely, or does the glaze remain visible?

Move on to the brushwork. Are the lines deliberate and controlled, or quick and abbreviated? Do repeated motifs vary slightly?

Finally, look at the relationship between image and form. Does the painting follow the curve of the vessel? Does the shape reinforce the decoration? Does the glaze change as the object catches the light?

Only then ask what the image means.

A Renaissance narrative may point towards classical learning, religion or history. A portrait may belong to a marriage or a private commission. A pharmaceutical vessel can reveal the world of an apothecary. A nineteenth-century revival may reveal a period’s fascination with the Renaissance itself. A contemporary ceramic may use colour and texture without telling a story at all.

The surface gives you the clues.

A surface is a record of looking

Faenza’s decorative tradition can be followed through its motifs, but also through changing ideas about what a ceramic surface should do.

The Renaissance filled it with stories and figures. Grotesques turned borders into spaces of invention. Compartments organised ornament around a centre. Blue grounds altered the relationship between colour and glaze. The bianchi discovered how much a few strokes could achieve against white. Later generations looked back at these languages and transformed them again.

Contemporary artists work with a much wider vocabulary, but the surface remains an active part of the work rather than a neutral support.

A painted leaf can carry the memory of a workshop tradition. A border can reveal a taste for antiquity. A blue ground can tell you something about technique and fashion. A few uneven brushstrokes can bring you directly to the person who made them.

The decoration is where a ceramic becomes specific: not simply a vessel from a particular place, but an object made at a particular moment, by particular hands, for particular eyes.