Islamic Civilization

Earthenware

 We call porcelain, Sarton  explains, that kind of ceramics of which the substance is vitrified and more or less translucent.[1] Porcelain  was invented by the Chinese , who were the first to see the advantage of baking ceramics at very high temperatures; in such circumstances certain ceramic wares- a mixture of kaolin and fusible feldspar-would necessarily be vitrified and remain translucent.[2] The earliest foreign account of Chinese porcelain is that given by Sulaiman the Merchant (9^th century).[3] Like paper, the compass, and much else, the Muslims soon were to borrow, adapt, develop, before conveying to the West this Chinese product. In the production of Porcelain in Baghdad , potters developed a white opaque tin-glaze composed of powdered potash-glass, oxides of lead and tin, and salt-in which to dip the once fired vessel, the result was a surface on which a brush could paint most delicate work.[4] The ceramics of Baghdad, and later Cairo , to which Baghdad potters migrated in the 11^th century, inspired imitation in Spain and Italy, and eventually the production of faience.[5]

 Lustre, like tin glaze, reached Spain before 1154, when al-Idrisi says that lustre-ware was produced in Aragon and exported.[6]Two centuries earlier, in the period lasting from 825 to 925, Muslim Spain was already marked by two interesting technological innovations, the horizontal loom mentioned above, and glazed pottery, which came into use, with the appearance of the first Eastern forms, as well as pottery with different colours on the same piece.[7] Polychrome textiles seem to arrive at the same time as polychrome pottery with which it shared both colours and decorative motifs; cosmopolitan trends beginning to become commonplace in 10^th century Andalusia .[8]The Andalusian  new type of pottery was unknown to Christian Spain, and also in the rest of Europe.[9] The Spanish  Muslims must therefore have had access at low cost to the production of the acids necessary for making glazed pottery.[10] After the 13^th century re-conquest, the skill known as `golden pottery' was located only in the region that was still Muslim, the Grenada enclave, precisely at Malaga, where Muslim potters as they did after the re-conquest, coated vessels with an opaque tin glaze or enamel as a base for painted decoration.[11] Malaga became a norm for the quality of excellent faience.[12] Output of lustre, as already detailed above, spread to Manises near Valencia , examples of which were also found in England  before 1400.[13] Much earlier than that, in fact, in 1289 a Spanish ship brought Islamic lustre pottery to queen Eleanor, and in 1303 lustre pieces are recorded in Sandwich, Kent.[14] Islamic tin glaze (and, to a notable though lesser extent, lustre) were to influence Italian maiolica.[15] It is obvious that Italy, geographically placed between Islamic influences coming direct from the eastern Mediterranean and those coming from Spain to the West, would be the catalyst; hence between the 13^th and 16^th centuries developed in Italy the tin glazed earthenware called maiolica, which provides a major channel for the dispersion of Islamic motifs.[16] The name maiolica (if not derived from Malaga, Arabic Maliqa)[17] points to the influence of the trade with Valencia in Spain via Majorca.[18] Durant explains that the Italians  called the material majolica, changing r to l in their melodious way.[19]The world maiolica is even used with the meaning of a metallic lustre in the 1530s by the potter Giorgio of Gubbio, a master of lustre painting: the usage is confirmed by the influential potter and writer the cavaliere Cipriano Piccolpasso of Casteldurante, in his Tre Libri dell'Arte de Vasaio (three books of the Potter's Art) compiled about 1556-9.[20] The same writer, incidentally, gives prominence to arabesques, rabeschi. Islamic motifs and the use of tin-glaze were to be passed to France in the faience of that country and to Holland and England in  the 17^th century.[21]

   An early 14^th century  text by  al-Khashani, explains the manufacture of faience, the ingredients needed, their mixtures, the kiln process and implements, the methods of glazing and decorating, as this was done in his own native place, Kashan, in Iraq Ajami (or Jibal).[22]This account, according to Sarton  is especially valuable because it is based on actual and traditional practice and also because it is unique of its kind in world literature until the 16^th century, with the earliest Italian account by Piccolpasso (c.1557).[23] Little surprise, once more, if the successor to the Muslim author is precisely the Italian, confirming trends and patterns observed above. And also the Italian writer succeeding his Muslim predecessor by two centuries, thus, highlighting the Islamic, rather than the Italian, pioneering role.