and early in the sixteenth centuries some of the most exquisite examples of artistic decoration and of the perfection of manufacture in this class of ceramics, we are unable to find a single proof of the use of the lustrous metallic tints, or a single example of pottery so enriched, which can with probability be ascribed to the Faenza furnaces. The same remark applies to other potteries on the northern side of the Apennines. The Piedmontese and Lombard cities do not appear to have encouraged the potter’s art to an equal extent in the 15th and 16th centuries, neither can we learn of any excellence attained in Venice till the establishment of Durantine and Pesarese artists at that city in the middle of the latter period. Possibly, the fine dish (engraved p. 33) may be of that manufacture: the costumes have a Venetian character. Perhaps commerce did for the Queen of the Adriatic by the importation of Rhodian, Damascus, and other eastern wares, what native industry supplied to the pomp and luxury of the hill cities of Umbria; for it must be borne in mind that the finer sorts of enamelled or glazed pottery, decorated by artistic hands, were only attainable by the richer class of purchasers; more modest wares or wooden trenchers, and ancestral copper vessels, contenting the middle class. The northern duchies, Ferrara, Rimini, and Ravenna, also encouraged the art, but to a smaller extent than that of Urbino. It would seem that the use of the white stanniferous enamel did not become general in Italy until some years after the death of Luca della Robbia, in 1481; and was not adopted by the potters of Umbria before the end of the fifteenth century. CHAPTER IV. The history of the development, perfection, and decline of the ceramic art of the renaissance in Italy is so intimately connected with and centred round that of the dukedom of Urbino, that in tracing its progress we must also briefly call to memory the fortunes and the failures of that noble house.