For its spring 2012 season, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello has organised an exhibition on the historiated majolica of the Renaissance, exploring how this art form relates to its literary, historical and figurative sources.
The museum's worldwide reputation relies above all on its numerous masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture, yet its equally outstanding collections of "applied art" are, in many ways, a crucial element in the attraction that the museum holds for visitors, and they go a long way towards explaining its importance for experts in the field of what were once known as the "minor arts".
Majolica is without question one of the most important of these collections, thanks in particular to the presence of a large number of rare and extremely high quality items from the Medici family's collections.  That is why this year the Bargello has decided, for the first time, to make a break with its series of exhibitions devoted to more or less famous Renaissance sculptors, in order to draw the public's attention to another of its many "treasures".
Our choice of the specific theme to which the exhibition is devoted – 16th century "historiated" majolica – was dictated by the special attraction that the princely splendour and decorative variety of these objets d'art will undoubtedly exercise even on the untrained eye.
Specially produced by the manufactories of Faenza and Urbino, these items were to become extremely popular with the courts and with leading artistocrats throughout Europe in the course of the 16th century, conjugating majestic and complex (on occasion even monumental) ceramic forms with the full splendour of contemporary painting and of its distinguished subjects taken from classical mythology and ancient history, thus contributing to the development of a painterly style "which had identifiably unique characteristics in majolica on account of the limited hues available:  the intense blues of the sky and of water, the luminous yellows and the fresh greens, all applied with a sure and sweeping hand which reached heights of sparkling precision in its Raphaelesque grotesques" (Cristina Acidini).

 Designed as "ceremonial" items rather than for daily use, and generally displayed on imposing dressers in banqueting halls, these "figured" majolica pieces (as they were often known at the time) drew their decorative repertoire primarily from the engravings which disseminated the works of the most celebrated painters of the time, whether in printed texts or on loose sheets, and which the "majolica masters" of Faenza and Urbino (but also of Deruta and Cafaggiolo) copied in vivid colours onto the enamelled surfaces of their pieces.  In addition to engravings, also drawings, small plaques, medals and small bronzes provided them with other models and sources of inspiration, as visitors will be able to see thanks to the display of appropriate pieces in the exhibition for purposes of comparison.
In the exhibition's two rooms – the first devoted to classical mythology themes and the second to themes from Homer and from ancient history – visitors will be able to admire some of the most beautiful pieces of majolica from the former Medici collections now in the Bargello, and to explore what was unquestionably, between the mid-16th and late 17th centuries, the most complete and prestigious collection of "figured" tableware ever to have seen the light of day, although it was later to be sadly decimated through sale and dispersion under Leopold II.
Alongside pieces from the Bargello's own collection, visitors will also be able to admire a considerable number of splendid "historiated" pieces on loan from other major Italian and foreign museums including the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza which has played the role of a fully-fledged partner in the initiative, as indeed has the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi which has loaned many of the drawings and engravings used for purposes of comparison.