Deruta Detour

My pattern is called “Grottesche”—on each cup the monster-dragons face each other, blowing orange plumes of stylized fire. First thing in the morning, as I hold my cup of coffee to warm my hands, I stare rather absently at my breakfast companions. These creatures are almost indiscernible among the colorful arabesques—unless one looks at them the way one learned to look at line-drawings in Children’s Highlife, where one found--tangled in tree-branches, lost in vines—the sudden shape of a lion. I bought four Deruta cups in the pattern when I first came to Spoleto, because I needed cups and everything else one generally needs to set up a home and a life. I would buy the cups, because coffee and tea are crucial, and then advance to dinner plates and pasta bowls, soup tureens and platters. Like a bride choosing a china pattern, envisioning the dreamy day when the place setting would be complete, I imagined my cups were the beginning of something—the start of a real home in my marriage to myself.

I knew the plates would be expensive, that’s why I’ve put them off, but I’d never dreamed how expensive or what process made them so until I visited Deruta yesterday to scope out a field trip for my students and perhaps finally pick up a dozen plates to bring home with me. To make a single Deruta plate takes three months’ effort by a staff of 42, each artist a graduate of the Deruta school, the average term of employment 50 years and sometimes as much as 70—an entire lifetime of perfecting the craft. At the factory one moves from the pits out back, where the clay—indigenous to the town of Deruta—is dug up, next to the refining room in which the clay is cleaned, then to the studio where the white coated artists are kneading out the slabs that will ultimately be put on the potters’ wheel and shaped. It dries for a dozen days and then is put on another wheel to be trimmed and smoothed with little blades held by expert hands, then dries for a month, I think I was told, before a first glazing and preparation for the artists who paint the designs much as Michaelangelo once painted frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, hand-drawing the design on wax paper, poking holes, dusting the plate or the urn or the candelabra with charcoal in order to transfer paper design onto clay and thereafter paint with fine brushes the trademark Deruta colors, originally green and brown, but after the introduction of cobalt from Africa in 1300, an entire palette of vivaciousness. The kilns run at 1200 degrees centigrade, the clay objects baking for 16 hours; once out, the flaws are touched up and other layers of glaze are applied. The entire process for a single plate! For a single cup! Each is handled so expertly, so lovingly (not one of the employees I met seemed bored—no radio buzzed to pass the time)! “This is what I want to do with my life,” I said to one of them. “But, ah,” I was reminded by my guide, "it takes a lifetime to perfect such a skill, plus you must first be born with the talent.” The 128 euro price for a signed dinner plate seemed a pittance given the level of care it took to create it.

Ubaldo Grazia, my guide, was also the proprietor of the business and factory, his family having manufactured Majolica ceramics for 500 years, one of only 15 companies in the world that has been in perpetual operation for so long, his company number 13 on the list. He pointed to a picture of his grandfather at 20, painting an urn the way I had just seen a woman in another room painting an urn of similar design—he might have been one of them, still alive—only the bulb-struck, posed look of a subject staring out of daguerratype hinted at the young man’s generation. “Here is a plate he painted at 13,” Ubaldo held up for me to see, one in the popular style of classical ladies--flowing locks and a winsome face dead center. I learned about pigment, about lusterware (not really gold!) about seasons of color and design. Fragments from decimated pottery were arranged like dead butterflies on specimen boards to illustrate the varieties along a time line.

At this point we were in the owner’s office-museum and he had pulled out a ledger dating back to 1926 so I could sign my name among the illustrious visitors. 80 years of yellow pages, leather-bound and only maybe a quarter-way filled. He pointed out the names of all of the American ambassadors, of Gucci and Tiffany presidents. Williams-Sanoma keeps his business thriving with a specialized line. Mel Gibson had commissioned huge contemporary panels of the stations of the cross. Another artist had made a Majolica sun dial representing the vicissitudes of the business…on the pedestal “Giu” for when the market was going down and “Su” for when it would be on the upswing again. I signed my name in green ink, trying to recall why I was here, who I was, what to say in the space for a comment. I felt immortalized.

Ubaldo sponsors a contest annually to invite artists to submit fresh designs and spend a season at the factory producing fresh lines of ceramics. From the Umbrian landscapes, painted with Japanese delicacy, to the outlandish Scandanavian splashes of primary color-wildness, I saw Deruta possibilities that challenged everything I thought I knew about my style. My “grottesche” monster dragons have been commonplace—conventional!—since the Renaissance. Wouldn’t I prefer something with a little more pizzazz…say a field of Spoletina poppies or farfalle—wild, flapping butterflies? Perhaps I would like to commission the factory to come up with a design plumbed from the depths of my own imagination! Ubaldo’s artists could achieve anything.

I did stop by the showroom and did pick out a new and wilder china pattern, though it saddens me to think I may never be able to afford it. Isn’t it a shame that single women can’t throw showers when they marry themselves and set up housekeeping? I am reconciled, though, to not owning my heart’s desire. I’d surely drop a plate and break it and feel the weight of 500 years of artistry crumble in my conscience along with the money-in-coins jingling to the tiles. My coffee cup cost only 12 euro at the boutique right here in Spoleto and I own a wealth of four. Conventional or no, this morning my fire-breathing monsters seemed oh-so precious to me, a veritable bestiary traveling through time from the Renaissance to find me and awaken me so I could convey to you the wonder.