"COMPENDIARIO" STYLE CERAMICS

The majolica craftsmen of Faenza had reached a zenith in both figured and unfigured ceramics decoration and coloring when, shortly after the middle of the 16th century, they gave the style of their work a new turn with the production of objects commonly called "Faenza white ware" or "compendiario* style ware".
Knowledge of this style comes down to us through archive documents and objects found and preserved even today. It is characterized by a white, thick coating glaze on the object, whence the common meaning of the term "white-ware style", and unlike the bright polychrome of the first half of the 16th century its color range is limited to a more or less thinned out blue and two tones of yellow (pale and orange). The result of this style is renewed form, greater importance of form, an increasing preciousity of surface, and a delicacy and lightness of touch in ornamentation.
These qualities may have been responsible for the immediate success of the new product and its great marketability until well past the middle of the 17th century.
Conventional objects, such as plates, bowls, pitchers, appear beside unusual forms - "crespine", which are ribbed bowls or cups with a scallopped rim and, occasionally, an umbo; or fruit bowls with pierced work and "baccellatura", a molded design of podshaped grooving.
There are also eccentric pieces - decorative obelisks, ink-stands designed like a cage, coolers and bottleholders with lion's-paw feet, salt cellars supported by harpies and dolphins - and all these objects, inspired largely by work in silver and bronze, have their surface covered with a glaze which takes on a very warm white tone and whose body and thickness soften the rigid lines of the forms modelled from metal prototypes.
But the decoration is simple - small figures, putti, coats of arms, light garlands of leaves and flowers, all characterized by a brief, light composition. They are just barely sketched in or "abbreviated" - compendiato in Italian, and thus the adoption of the term "compendiario" to describe this style of majolica painting. Among its most important masters were the majolica craftsmen Virgiliotto Calamelli, Leonardo Bettisi (called "Don Pino"), and the Dalle Palle family.
The compendiario style met with such great success that the masters of Faenza were induced to enlarge their markets by seeking new work space in other cities and countries. And so we find signs of their work in Verona, Turin, Genoa, and abroad - in France, Holland , and even in Eastern Europe. The fame of Faenza white ware spread and grew to such a great degree that finally, from the second half of the 16th century on, the name "faïence" - a French term derived from Faenza - was used generically for all such tin-glazed products, just as it is today.

*The ceramics scholar, G. Ballardini, took the term "compendiario" from archaeology, where it was used to designate a type of Roman painting (pictura compendiaria) which grew up around the end of the 1st century A.C. Its technique of rapid, essential brush strokes reproduced a particular mode in Hellenistic painting, which preceded it.