The site Bella Umbria offers you to visit selected ceramists of Deruta, where you will be able to see their ancient methods of ceramic production and the handmade pottery and splendid ceramics they realize: vases, plates, lamps, mugs, dolls, dinnerware, tableware, objects for decoration or everyday use and a lot more born in the fervent imagination of these outstanding artists. We suggest you to have a look through these and other producers in order to discover the thousand handmade products and the thousand fantastic savours this italian antique region, Umbria, can offer.Buy and gift you something special!

History of Deruta Pottery and Ceramic

If official documents do establish that pottery and ceramic has been produced in Deruta since the XIIIth century, we have reasons to believe that the beginning of such an activity has to be established at least one century earlier. Anyway, at the end of the XIIIth century, Deruta had produced so many ceramics that it could pay the charges imposed to the city by Perugia in vases instead of money. At the end of the XIVth century, Deruta had for that reason hold a position of "regional" producer of pottery, ceramics and majolica and was, so to say, exporting. In fact, according to evidences, as early as in 1358 Deruta had exported more than one thousand vases in ceramics to Assisi, homeland of Saint Francesco, place where the need for pottery articles for the table and ceramic souvenirs for the pilgrims come to visit the tomb of the Saint was high.
The wealthiest period for Deruta was without any doubt the XVIth century, when its artists took part, althought with reflection, to the climate of artistic and cultural revolution of the Renaissance. It is during this period that the famous "Raffaellesco" ornament becomes popular, symbole of the pottery production of Deruta (see nearby picture). The term "raffaellesco" is coming from one of the big stars of the Renaissance: Raffaello. At the beginning of the century, Raffaello painted a serie of fresco with the decoration of a Loggia in the Vatican and some of its patterns were "grotesque": a fantastic composition of plants, animals and men. Ceramists of Deruta, even if they had not seen by themselves such fresco, knew them thanks to prints and the "grotesque" ornaments started to be painted on their pottery. From the end of the XVIIth century until the XIXth century Deruta suffered from the general political and economic crisis and also from the growing competition of other places of production, such as for example Castelli d'Abruzzo. We have to wait until the second half of the XIXth century to see a new birth of the interest for the "Renaissance" majolica and therefore for the ceramic of Deruta.