Dish

Lusterware is the term used to describe a glazed earthenware ceramic decorated with an iridescent finish. The technique for creating this finish was developed in the ninth century under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate in present-day Iraq. The medium involves a technique that is difficult to master, but if completed successfully, the surfaces of the ceramic objects display an iridescent sheen which is achieved through multiple firings and the application of a metal-based pigment (including silver, copper, tin, or a combination of these). Lusterware manufacture is still difficult to understand from a technical perspective because for generations, production was kept secret to protect workshop practices from being replicated by competitors. Therefore, pigment formulas and trade techniques were passed down from master to pupil and rarely recorded.

Knowledge of the technique for creating lusterware made its way to the Iberian Peninsula by the twelfth century, when most of the region was still under Islamic rule. By the 1400s, the Iberian center of lusterware production was in Manises, near the city of Valencia. Previously a Muslim taifa, or principality, the Kingdom of Valencia was conquered in the thirteenth century by James I for the Crown of Aragon, and it was here that Christians and Muslim potters worked, sometimes together, for a diverse clientele with a voracious appetite for high quality lustered wares.

Beginning in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the famed lusterware potters of Manises, near Valencia, experimented with new compositions and designs that included incised reliefs of large animals and fantastic creatures spanning the surface of entire dishes such as this one. The artist would use either a stencil or draw freehand and fill in the space around the figure with smaller decorative elements. Here, the artist experimented with wheel-like shapes and four-petaled flowers on the wings, a network of interlinked circles on the body, and swirling plants in the background. Many of the plates that follow this general design are completed in a coppery finish which is created by an absence of silver in the pigment. On the reverse, large fern fronds dominate the surface.