Fabric: The color is buff, tan, light pink, or light gray (Munsell 7.5YR 8/4 and 7/4: pink). The fabric is friable and especially hard for earthenware. It has no visible inclusions to the naked eye.

Glaze: Overall white tin glaze with numerous polychrome decorations. The "color scheme is characterized by broad brush strokes in garish dark and light blue, dark and light green, red, brown, orange, and purple" (Hurst et al.1986). The motifs include lozenges, geometric interlace, checker, and net patterns, sgraffito, fruit and flowers, and scenes of cavaliers, ladies, and/or landscapes.

The most common design motifs surviving in museum collections are the so-called Cavalier dishes. These incorporate soldiers, sometimes wielding weapons or flags, and are typical between ca. 1575 and 1650. Also known during this period, but stopping about 1620, are the dishes with comedia dell'arte iconography. The comedia dell'arte is an Italian improvised comedy with stock characters performed by a traveling troupe that stopped in small European towns. These shows have a long tradition, well into medieval times, that continues to this day.

The backs or outsides of the dishes frequently are painted with horizontal purple concentric circles. These bands are not found on ceramic copies from the French or Low Countries.

Form: Wide range of wheel thrown forms including "flanged dishes, bowls and tazze with simple rounded rims sometimes with an internal beading. The dishes and bowls have angular footed bases which are flat or slightly concave underneath. The tazze have open, heavily molded pedestals" (Hurst et al. 1986:12-13).



Montelupo is located in the Tuscany region on the Arno River between the Italian cities of Florence and Pisa. The Arno feeds into the Ligurian Sea giving Montelupo an advantage over inland pottery production centers. "In the 16th century Montelupo seems to have obtained a near monopoly of the polychrome maiolica trade throughout the Mediterranean as far east as Egypt and westwards to Spain (thence across to the Americas (Lister & Lister:1976)) and up the English Channel to both sides of the North Sea" (Hurst et al. 1986: 12). However, by the 17th century, Italy had "lost its leading role in the development of European tin glaze and the initiative [had been] passed to France and the Low Countries. There continued to be lively and varied production centers scattered through Italy . . . including the Tuscany region" (Wilson 1987:169).

Montelupo tin-glazed earthenware has been found on many 16th- and early 17th-century sites in Britain and Ireland. In Virginia it has been found on sites that date to the second quarter of the 17th century.

Sources

Sites
Buck Site (44JC568), ca.1630-45
Flowerdew Hundred (44PG64/65)
Mathews Manor
Site J
Jamestown Island (National Park Service)
Governor's Land
Jamestown Rediscovery: Plowzone

Prepared by Seth Mallios