I had such great fun making this illustration on my ipad. It’s an (idealised?) amalgam of various designs I have seen on cypriot sgraffito ceramic plates and fragments. In the early 1200’s –medieval Cyprus being a Crusader kingdom under the rule of the Lusignans– a new kind of ceramic art appeared, sporting these distinctive and very appealing decorations in brownish yellow and green glazes. Α surprising number of these bowls, wine cups and plates survive, which perhaps attests to their popularity and widespread usage.
Part of their charm has to be the colour scheme, a result of copper and iron oxide glazes painted and fired on top of lines scratched through the light coloured slip, so that the natural dark colour of the clay shows through. The subject matter is sometimes just decorative patterns, but often there are figures as well: delightful damsels or pages, couples, or single male and female figures engaged in genteel pastimes, such as wine drinking or falconry!
I’ll leave the rest to the experts: here’s a quote and link to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge where some of these can be seen…
Cyprus has a long tradition of producing both hand-made and wheel-made pottery in an exuberant range of colours and styles of decoration that goes back to the Bronze Age. The technology of the Medieval wares shown in this exhibition was practised in many parts of the Byzantine world, but the Cypriot potters exploited their own excellent clay sources and native ingenuity to develop their own distinctive local styles.
Decorated glazed ceramics are mostly tablewares, used on a daily basis by a large section of the population in the towns and villages. A large number of ceramics are found in graves. This is probably connected with burial customs that still survive in Cyprus today, in which the priest pours oil from a vessel on to the body in the grave and then throws the vessel in on top.
First Sunday of Carnival is Kids’ Day. Come join the parade, in Nicosia or Limassol!
Ephemeral to Stay 