Italian Maiolica and Europe

The internationally important collection of Italian maiolica in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is based on the collection of the Victorian scholar-collector C.D.E. Fortnum (1820-99).

This book is a full catalogue of the Ashmolean's Italian pottery and also includes tin-glazed pottery from other countries, including Spain, France, the Low Countries, England, and Mexico. It presents a panorama of the achievement of Italian potters and pottery-painters, who transformed a technology they learnt from the Islamic world into a vivid form of Renaissance art, which was then diffused across Europe and beyond, creating individual national ceramic traditions.

Timothy Wilson (b.1950) was Keeper of Western Art in the Ashmolean Museum from 1990 and Professor of the Arts of the Renaissance in the University of Oxford. From 2013 to 2017 he was Barrie and Deedee Research Keeper in the Ashmolean. He is a specialist in the decorative arts of the European Renaissance, especially ceramics. His publications on Italian maiolica include catalogues of the collections in the British Museum (2009, with Dora Thornton), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2015, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016).