By Ines Keane
Pottery was made in Deruta in the early Middle Ages, yet no surviving piece can be firmly pinned to the town before about 1490. Everything earlier is inference, not object.
The paper trail is a little better. A potters’ guild is documented for 1336, and the town’s peak came in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when Deruta became one of the defining centers of maiolica, the tin-glazed earthenware with an opaque white ground and bright painted color. A mid-sixteenth-century writer, the Dominican Leandro Alberti, praised its wares as unmatched in Italy. By the standard account that praise arrived just as quality was starting to decline.
Deruta’s technical claim to fame is lustre. Metal salts are applied to a piece that has already been through the usual two firings, and it is fired a third time at reduced heat in a low-oxygen kiln. The result is a golden or pearly metallic sheen. Deruta is described as the first Italian maiolica center to produce quality lustre, probably toward the end of the 1400s, though Gubbio is also famous for it. The first firmly dated Deruta lustre piece is a plaque of Saint Sebastian from 1501, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
None of this is only history. Deruta has more than 200 ceramic workshops, and most sell their own work. Styles run from careful historical reproduction to looser contemporary painting. The town’s ceramics museum, the Museo Regionale della Ceramica, sits in a former Franciscan monastery. It is described as Italy’s first ceramics museum, founded in 1898. Ruins of very old kilns still dot the area.