Italian Hand-Painted Majolica | Small Bowl with Floral Vine Pattern and Mottled Glaze · Italian Folk Art Antique Pottery
A small, charming Italian hand-painted ceramic bowl with a distinctly Southern European feel. The piece uses a mottled milky white to off-white glaze as its ground, with the interior freely hand-painted with vines, leaves and flowers in dark green, olive green, brick red, yellow and blue. The decoration is not strictly symmetrical, nor does it strive for dense, elaborate detail; instead it preserves the appealing handmade quality and rustic character of Italian folk pottery. The outer edge of the rim carries a ring of short dark green strokes, encircling the entire mouth like stitching; the outer body is then bound by two dark green ring lines. The interior and exterior decoration echo one another — seemingly simple, yet the overall color scheme is remarkably complete. Particularly worth noting is the ground color of the pottery itself: it is not the perfectly even pure white of modern mass-produced tableware, but a glaze with a slightly grayish-beige tone, fine speckling and irregular variation, which, combined with the hand-painted flowers and foliage, gives a very natural sense of age. Turned over, the base clearly shows a hand-written "ITALY" mark, providing direct information on the Italian origin of this small ceramic piece.
