takes place in the colouring of this
_graffiato_ ware. Instead of the simple glazes, of uniform colour, of
the earlier productions, underglaze colours--green, purple, blue and a
brown of the tint of burnt sienna which passes into a glossy black where
it is thick--were applied in bold splashes under the straw-coloured
glaze, producing a rich and decorative effect by very simple means. As
fine examples of this kind we may mention the dish with the mandoline
players, and one with cupids disporting themselves in a tree, in the
Victoria and Albert Museum; the tazza, supported by three modelled
lions, in the Louvre; and the dish, with figures of the Virgin and two
saints, in the museum at Padua. The ware has often been called, quite
erroneously, _mezza-majolica_. It had nothing to do with majolica, being
the natural development of a much older process; and its manufacture was
carried on all through the period of majolica manufacture and has never
ceased.

2. _Mezza-Majolica_--This name is accurately applied to certain Italian
wares that made their appearance in the 12th century or even earlier,
when rude patterns--a clumsy star, a rude crossing of strokes or some
equally elementary work--are found painted on a thin white ground
covering a drab body. The pieces, generally pitchers of ungainly forms,
are uncouth in the extreme; the body has been shaped in local clay and
then thinly coated by dipping it into a white slip, which seems at first
to have been of white clay only, though oxide of tin and lead were added
to it even in the 12th century. The colours used for the rude painting
were oxide of copper and oxide of manganese, and the final glaze, which
is generally thin and often imperfectly fused, seems to have been based
on the alkaline glazes of the nearer East. The specimens so assiduously
recovered by Professor Aragnani, some of which, or similar wares, are to
be found in the Louvre, the British and the Victoria and Albert museums,
are typical of the rude work out of which, by a fuller knowledge of
Spanish methods, the painted majolica grew.

3. _Majolica_--For the last three centuries the word majolica has been
used to signify an Italian ware with a fine but comparatively soft buff
body, coated with an opaque tin-enamel of varying degrees of whiteness
and purity, on which a painted decoration was laid and fired. In the
later pictorial wares, a fine coating of transparent alkaline glaze was
fired over the painting to sof