[Footnote 240: We enter not upon the contested question of the origin of these productions; wherever made, they prove the taste of those who owned and appreciated them. Besides, the ruder varieties were certainly indigenous to Central Italy from an early period. Neither need we trace the analogy between majolica and enamel. The latter was not unknown to the ancients, though brought by them to no ornamental perfection. During the dark ages, it was used as an accessory of metal sculpture for many purposes of religious art, and was even introduced into large works, such as bronze doors. The splendid reliquary at Orvieto, enamelled on silver at Siena by Ugolino Vieri in 1338, as well as the _paliotti_ of Florence and Pistoja executed in that and the following centuries, show to what perfection this art had attained, ere the painting of porcelain was practised in Italy.] [Illustration: MAIOLICA _A plate of Urbino ware of about 1540 in the British Museum_] The earthenware made in Central Italy was usually called _majolica_, in our spelling maiolica. The derivation of its etymology, from the island of Majorca, seems no mere superficial inference from similarity of sounds. Its peculiarity was a glaze, which, besides giving a vehicle for colour, remedied the permeable quality of ancient pottery. Such a glazed surface had long been known to the Saracens, and was imported by the Moors into Spain and the Balearic Isles, in the shape of gaily-tinted tiles, arranged in bands or diaper on their buildings. To these succeeded _azulejos_, generally of blue in various shades, which were mosaicked into church walls in various historical compositions, from designs which Mr. Stirling ascribes to Murillo's pencil. The conquests or commerce of the Pisans imported this fashion, at first by incorporating concave coloured tiles among brickwork, afterwards, at Pesaro, by the use of encaustic flooring. Nor can we exclude from view that the earliest Italian ware has decorations either in geometrical patterns, or with shamrock-shaped foliations of a character rather Saracenic than indigenous, and more indicative of moresque extraction than were the apocryphal armorial bearings of Spain and Majorca, at a period when such insignia were often borrowed as mere ornaments, in ignorance of their origin and meaning. The fabric thus introduced spread over most of Central Italy, and between 1450 and 1700 was largely practised at the towns of Arezzo, Perugia, Spello, Nocera, Città di Castello, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Forlì, and Faenza (whence its French name _fayence_), Pesaro, Urbino, Fermignano, Castel Durante, and Gubbio, as well as at various places in the Abruzzi.