Our knowledge of the production of Maiolica, or rather of artistic enamelled pottery, in VENICE may be said to begin with the year 1540. Previous to that date there can be little doubt that the Venetian ovens produced enamelled wares of greater or less merit, but we have no sufficient record of their character. M. Jacquemart believes that works existed at Venice as early as the second half of the fifteenth century, arguing that if the qualities of the Venetian pottery were of so high an order at that period as to induce the inventor of the celebrated _bianco di Ferrara_ to order vases for his own pharmacy, it must have been developed and perfected from an earlier date. But signor Lazari considered that the examples of glazed tiles existent in the sacristy of the church of Sta. Elena at Venice, having the arms of the Giustiniani family and dating about 1450-80; as also those in the Lando chapel of S. Sebastiano, having a monogram and the date 1510, and other examples anterior to about 1545, were importations from Faenza or from Castel Durante; an opinion shared by the writer after a careful examination of those pavements. The woodcut, however, p. 182 represents a very fine dish which we may reasonably ascribe to Venice; of about the year 1540: now at Kensington, no. 4438. Sir William Drake quotes a petition, dated 1664, from the guild of the “Boccaleri” of Venice, in which reference is made to previous decrees in their favour issued in the years 1455, 1472, and 1518, prohibiting the importation of foreign earthenware; and a decree of the senate in 1665 prohibiting the importation or sale in Venice of any sort of foreign earthenware by any person [Illustration] not being a member of the guild, but upon the condition that that body should keep the city well supplied with “latesini,” and that shops should be kept open for its sale. From the general tenor of this petition we may reasonably infer that at the period of its presentation the potter’s art in Venice was reduced to the production of very ordinary wares. It is curious also, and perhaps confirmatory of the inferiority of Venetian artistic pottery, that an exception in the decree against importation should be made in favour of the maiolica of Valencia, which we know also to have been imported into Genoa. This ware, which had once been excellent, had greatly deteriorated in 1664. The culminating period of the excellence of Venetian pottery in respect to painting and design was probably the middle of the sixteenth century.