Capodimonte porcelain
[1] The porcelain of Capodimonte, and later Naples, was a "superb" translucent soft-paste, "more beautiful" but much harder to fire than the German hard-pastes,[2] or "a particularly clear, warm, white, covered with a mildly lustrous glaze".
[4] The entire Capodimonte factory was moved to Madrid (and became the Real Fábrica del Buen Retiro) after its founder, King Charles, inherited the Spanish throne from his brother in 1759.
[8] The kingdom's diplomatic network around Europe was ordered to seek out experienced workers and trade secrets, paying generously, and internally a successful organized search was made for sources of the correct minerals, with local authorities sending samples to the capital.
[12] When Charles became King of Spain in 1759 he took the equipment and about 40 key workers, including Gricci, with him, to found the Real Fábrica del Buen Retiro in Madrid.
[14] Although the Capodimonte structures and equipment such as kilns and moulds that were not taken to Spain were destroyed, many of the remaining workers were hired by the new Giustiniani factory, which attempted to find a formula for porcelain but failed, instead making fine earthenware similar to Wedgwood.
[16] By 1806, Napoleon had invaded the Kingdom of Naples and the Bourbons fled to Sicily, protected by the British Navy; production was discontinued at the factory.
[18] Following a trend in the later years of the Naples porcelain factory,[19] after it closed, Neapolitan potteries continued to make creamware, fine glazed earthenware, similar to English Wedgwood.
During the second half of the 19th century, the first private porcelain factories in Naples were created, eventually including Majello (1867), Mollica, Cacciapuoti, Visconti, and many others.
[20] "Capo di Monte" was also used in the 19th century, for example by Royal Worcester in England, to refer to styles of figurines, that are in fact little related to the 18th-century Neapolitan products.
[25] The shell-shaped snuffbox, modelled in low relief with further small shells and seaweed, was a Gricci design introduced in the first year which remained popular.
[26] The popular figures of ordinary people were introduced early, and there are large numbers of models; since Buen Retiro concentrated on these, the difficulties in telling Neapolitan and Madrid pieces apart mostly affect these.
[32] In Caselli's style for painted scenes "compositions were built by gradations of very fine stippling in which much use was made of soft grays and browns", as in the jar with Pulcinellas illustrated.
Styles were affected by a general European change of taste towards Neoclassicism, intensified by the local interest as the continuing excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites near Naples became well-known.
[44] Naples porcelain, 1771 to 1806 The various factories whose wares were sold as "Capodimonte" from the early 19th century onwards mostly stuck to Victorianized versions of the 18th-century forms and styles.
In the 20th century a style of "raggedly dressed peasants of Walt Disney cartoon appearance" developed, along with "a sub-class of earthenware pieces, mostly boxes, of appalling quality with brassy gilding" but still with the crowned "N" mark.
