The Impact of Hispano-Moresque Imports in Fifteenth-century Florence

aesthetic or, indeed, monetary value is, to some degree, part of Christendom's debt to the Islamic world, which had been producing gorgeously decorated ceramics for some six hundred years before the flowering of Italian maiolica in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.1 The Nasrid kingdom of Andalucía was the last outpost of Islam in Western Europe. It was founded, with its capital at Granada, in 1238, and lasted until it was overwhelmed by the armies of the united Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492. From the thirteenth century, potters in the port of Malaga had made a speciality of luster, adding blue derived from imported cobalt to the palette, and achieved astonishing kiln virtuosity. The colossal wing-handled vases made by Malagan potters to decorate the Alhambra Palace in Granada (fig. 1) are, both technically and artistically, among the most brilliant and virtuoso achievements in world ceramics.