Two handwritten books from Winterthur with recipes for faience colours and glazes from the mid-18th century – in memory of Ernst Fehr 1927 – 2010
Wolf Matthes, 2018
Summary
The recipes for faience glazes and colours as recorded by Cipriano Piccolpasso in the mid-16th century and commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries, were deemed to be of little value by a reviewer of Piccolpasso’s manuscript in 1758, because, he claimed, they had long ago become common knowledge among apprentices in Italian manufactories. This knowledge, however, was very slow to be disseminated northwards and still appears to have been new in our region in the early 18th century. It was only over the course of the 18th century that it quickly spread throughout central Europe, as is apparent from contemporary recipe notes. Some of the recipes recorded by David Pfau, for instance, are quite similar to Piccolpasso’s, though they often contain local raw materials and were modified to suit local conditions. Twelve recipes for “opaque white” stand out, though they did not produce a typical white opaque faience glaze but rather a shiny, transparent coating that corresponds to Italian coperta or Dutch kwaart and were used mainly on large-format stove tiles or on plain white backgrounds to make multi-coloured underglaze painted decorations appear shinier and their outlines more discernible. The term Meistergut used in some contemporary recipes, does not appear in either of the two recipe books.
Translation Sandy Hämmerle
