A large share of the production of maiolica in the 16th cen tury belongs to the duchy of Urbino. Castel Durante (now called Urbania) made wares predominantly decorated with fancifully conceived arrangements of weapons, musical instruments and the like combined in trophies with grotesque masks, dolphins and cornucopias. One Zoua (i.e., Giovanni) Maria employed such themes as borders to enclose figure-subjects of exquisite delicacy. Castel Durante was also the birth-place of Nicola Pellipario, the greatest of maiolica-painters, who migrated to Urbino and there adopted the name Fontana; he brought narrative (istoriato) painting to an unsurpassed pitch of perfection in several services of plates with mythological and other subjects, particularly one with the arms and devices of Isabella d'Este and another now in the Museo Civico, Venice. He freely adapted motives from en gravings, including the woodcuts of an edition of Ovid's Metamor phoses published at Venice in 1497. Nicola's style was followed, in progressive deterioration, by his grandson, Orazio Fontana, and others of his family, and by Francesco Xanto and Alfonso Patan azzi, all of whom owned or painted at potteries at Urbino itself. In these, about 155o, a new and pleasing style of ornament was adopted, of airy and fanciful arabesques in the manner of Raphael scattered over a creamy white ground ; about the same time also Urbino began to produce imposing snake-handled urns, fountains, wine-cisterns, salt-cellars and inkstands (the latter often in the form of a group of figures) in shapes largely borrowed from bronze or silver. Pictorial wares similar to those of Urbino were made about 156o in the workshop of the Lanfranchi family at Pesaro. The maiolica of Gubbio, made by Maestro Giorgio An dreoli and his successors, is famous for its lustre painting, in golden yellow and especially in a rich ruby colour ; at first this artist fol lowed the style of the Deruta lustred wares, but about 1518 he began to produce designs of his own, including grotesques and trophies like those of Castel Durante, figures of putti within sym metrical border-ornament, and pictorial subjects based on engrav ings, chiefly after Raphael. Besides making pottery for his own decoration, he added lustre enrichments to already-painted wares sent from Urbino, Castel Durante and Faenza for the purpose.
There were several maiolica factories at Venice. In some of these pictorial wares were made like those of Urbino, but generally of indifferent quality. One Maestro Lodovico produced about 153o-5o a distinctive class of wares strongly influenced by the Near Eastern pottery and Chinese porcelain then beginning to be imported by Venetian traders; they are painted solely or chiefly in blue on an enamel stained to a pale greyish-blue. The I 7th century Venetian maiolica displays a fondness for architectural subjects and occasionally ornament in high relief imitating con temporary repousse silver.
The potteries of the Ligurian coast between Genoa and Savona came into prominence in the 17th century with their blue-and white maiolica sometimes directly copied from Chinese porcelain; at the same time close imitations of Turkish earthenware were being made at Candiana near Padua. From about 167o onwards the potteries of Castelli, in the Abruzzi, and its neighbourhood produced wares with polychrome painting in subdued colouring of figure-subjects and landscapes.
Italy is remarkable not only for its maiolica but also for a dis tinctive kind of lead-glazed earthenware with decoration incised through a coating of white slip (sgraffito). The glaze is generally of a deep buff tone, giving a dark brown colour to the red body where revealed by the engraving of the decoration, which is of ten heightened by touches of green and purple laid on with a brush before the application of the glaze. The technique, derived through the Byzantine dominions from the Islamic East, attained artistic importance in Italy towards the end of the 15th century. Recent investigations have shown that although it was practised at several other places north of the Apennines, the wares in which it is dis played at its best were made under the patronage of the Ben tivoglio family at Bologna. Sgraffito ware was made at Bologna until the 17th century.
In 1578 a pottery for this kind of earthenware (called in French faience) was set up at Nevers by three brothers named Conrade, from Albissola near Genoa, and continued in the hands of their descendants. In the 17th century, under Chinese influences, poly chrome gave way to blue-and-white painting, with manganese for the outlines, though classical themes continued for a time in favour. Soon after, subjects adapted from late Ming Chinese porcelain became the fashion.
A privilege for making faience at Rouen was accorded in to Nicolas Poirel, who was succeeded by Edme Poterat and his son, and in the reign of Louis XIV. the city became a thriving centre of the faience industry, noteworthy for the large dimensions of many of its wares—dishes, wall-cisterns, and life-size busts on pedestals. A distinctive style of decoration was introduced char acterised by wide borders and radial arrangements of palmettes, scrolls and festoons somewhat resembling lace ; in the motives of this graceful lambrequin decoration Chinese elements are blended with those of the classical baroque. The painting is carried out in blue, either alone or combined with red or ochre-yellow. About 173o, in the pottery of Guillibaud and others, a change came about in favour of a more varied polychrome palette ; motives borrowed from the Far East assert themselves, together with the asym metrical scrollwork, shells and cornucopias of the rococo, and towards the end of the century the enamel-painted flowers of con temporary porcelain were imitated. The faience industry at Rouen as elsewhere was killed by competition with imported English wares.