Provenance: French private collection.

The albarello was traditionally a pharmacy jar, which developed in the Middle East. Their waisted form developed to aid with picking them up, and the mouth designed to be covered with parchment or leather and banded with cord. Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, albarellos were exported in large quantities from Persia, Syria and Egypt to Europe, resulting in their production in Spain and Italy.

This large, monochrome example was made in Manises, Spain. It is made of fritware, decorated with metallic lustre glaze, the reddish-brown hue of which indicates a high copper content. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the heyday of the Valencian ceramics industry, glazes tended towards yellow and gold due to a liberal use of silver. As the ceramics industry declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, copper was substituted for gold in the glazes, producing the rich red colour of these pieces.[1]

The distinctive combination of cream tin glaze and copper lustre glaze can be seen on objects such as a 17th century barrelled jar in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (accession no. C.3-1911) and a 17th century plate in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession no. 91.1.118). However, this is the only known monochromic copper-lustre albarello.

[1] Tolar, Tanja. ‘Spanish Lustre Dish’, Illuminating Objects. Retrieved online at https://sites.courtauld.ac.uk/illuminating-objects/illuminating-objects-home/spanish-lustre-dish/ on 14/05/2024.