Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Ever since its first publication in the mid-nineteenth century Cipriano Piccolpasso’s treatise on the art of the potter has been eagerly studied by historians of ceramics and by artist-potters alike. There is nothing surprising in this. The Arte del Vasaio is remarkable in many ways-for the detail and charms of its drawings; for the clarity and methodical sequence of its practical instructions; for its recipes for glazes and pigments (which are about a hundred and fifty years earlier than any comparable collection); for its account of the sources of raw materials and of their preparation; and for the pride and affectionate enthusiasm which permeate its pages from first to last. It is the first known comprehensive description written in Europe of the manufacture of any kind of pottery. Even if the area were widened to include Islam the only record which is in any way comparable is the Treatise of Abu’l Qasim of Kashan written about 1301 an intriguing but much shorter document without illustrations and far less intelligible The original manuscript has now been in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum for over a century. The text together with an annotated translation and an introduction was published in 1934 in a handsome edition by two distinguished scholars of the Museum: Bernard Rackham Keeper of the Department of Ceramics and Albert Van de Put. Keeper of the Library. It has long been recognized that their edition for all its great merits requires considerable revision. This is the task the present authors have attempted. (OS)