Object Record

Peacocks Vase

Ceramist

Galileo Chini

Manufactory

Fornaci San Lorenzo

Year

c. 1906–1910

Material

Luster-glazed earthenware

Dimensions

H 55 cm

Animal Classification

Birds → Land & Aerial Birds

Geographic Classification

Continental Europe → Italy → Tuscany → Borgo San Lorenzo

Object Details

Luster-glazed earthenware. H 55 cm. Borgo San Lorenzo (Mugello), Tuscany, Italy. Vaso con pavoni.

Marks & Inscriptions

Painted in blue on the base: the gridiron of San Lorenzo surmounted by the Florentine lily, with “MVGELLO” and the number 2073. This is the first mark of the Fornaci San Lorenzo, in use c. 1906–1910; it lacks the encircling ring, the “CHINI E Co” legend, and the word “ITALIA” that characterize the firm’s mark of c. 1919–1940. The single number is itself a feature of the early mark: pieces bearing the later legend generally carry two numbers separated by a stroke (18/2042, 219/2386, and the like), the second of which is the decoration number recorded in the firm’s production album. No other mark, inscription, or label is present.

Provenance

South Antiques, Buenos Aires, Argentina; acquired through 1stDibs.com, February 2025

Literature

This example is unpublished. On the design, its documentation, and the Italian context:

Casali, Claudia, and Valerio Terraroli, eds. Galileo Chini: Ceramiche tra Liberty e Déco / Ceramics: From Liberty to Déco. Exh. cat., Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, 26 November 2022 – 14 May 2023. Rome: Gangemi Editore International, 2022. ISBN 978-88-492-4567-7. Marks concordance, p. 49, figs. 5–6; pp. 136–37, figs. 62–63 (an example of the design, dated 1906–1909 in conception and 1919–1930 in execution).

Eidelberg, Martin, David Conradsen, and Johnathan Clancy. European Ceramics Circa 1900: The Eidelberg Collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026. Pp. 165–67 (Italy), on the reception of Stile Liberty between the Turin expositions of 1898 and 1902, with Chini’s pottery in the Lauro room of 1898 (p. 165 and n. 2) and his gold medal at Paris in 1900 (p. 166); pp. 29–34 (France and Belgium), for the French frame against which the comparative note below is drawn.

Galleni, Daniele. Galileo Chini: un artista della ceramica tra la Toscana e l’Europa. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2023. ISBN 978-88-596-2303-8. Cat. 105, p. 209 (another example of the design, dated 1906–1909 in conception and 1919–1930 in execution).

Monti, Raffaele, ed. La Manifattura Chini, with texts by Gilda Cefariello Grosso and Raffaele Monti. Rome: De Luca Edizioni d’Arte / Milan: Leonardo Editore, 1989. ISBN 88-7813-236-5. P. 110, fig. 107, and scheda no. 102 (the Faenza example, Vaso con pavoni, Fornaci S. Lorenzo, ideazione c. 1906–1911, realizzazione c. 1919–1925) — the earliest published statement of the two-date framework and of the Faenza dating, which the later catalogs follow.

Parisi, Francesco, and Anna Villari, eds. Liberty in Italia: artisti alla ricerca del moderno. Exh. cat., Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, 5 November 2016 – 14 February 2017. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016. ISBN 978-88-366-3516-0. P. 171, figs. 135–136 (fig. 135, Chini’s autograph study, bozzetto per Vaso con pavone, Collezione V. Chini, c. 1906–1911; fig. 136, the Faenza example); ceramics essay by Eugenia Querci.

Authorship & Production

Galileo Chini (Florence 1873–1956), painter, decorator, stage designer, and ceramist, for the Fornaci San Lorenzo (Chini e Co.), Borgo San Lorenzo, Mugello, Tuscany, Italy. The firm was founded in 1906 by Galileo Chini, who directed its artistic production, and his cousin Chino Chini (1870–1957), who directed its technical operation. The design is Galileo Chini’s, documented by his autograph study; the execution is the firm’s, and the luster firing was Chino Chini’s province.

Commentary

This luster-glazed earthenware vase, produced at the Fornaci San Lorenzo in Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Mugello north of Florence, stands 55 cm high and carries three peacocks around its body. The vessel is an elongated ovoid, drawn in at the shoulder to a short neck and a plain everted rim, narrow at the foot, with an uninterrupted field of surface running from base to rim. The proportions are those of an object conceived for a decorated interior rather than for use.
The birds are drawn rather than modeled. A continuous cobalt line establishes each neck, the small, crested head, the beak, and the folded wing, and that line does nearly all the descriptive work; the bodies are indistinguishable in relief from the wall of the vase. From each wing the tail breaks into a diagonal cascade of ocelli that sweeps down and around the lower body, and the three trains interlock so that the vessel is encircled without any point at which the composition resolves into a front and a back. The ocelli are built from concentric rings of blue, black, and pale green, each with a dark center, laid with precision that does not vary as the pattern turns across the wall’s curve.
Behind and beneath the birds the ground carries a fine network of small circles and loops drawn into the surface and read through the glaze rather than painted on top of it. This under-drawing catches the light differently from the painted areas and lends the ground a suspended, atmospheric quality, closer to a rendering of air or water than to a flat backdrop. It is the least conspicuous element of the decoration and one of the most considered.
The glaze is where the object makes its argument. Applied in graduated films of green, celadon, and pale gold, it carries a metallic luster that shifts with the angle of view, moving through blue-green, silver, and a warm amber at the foot. Luster demands a further firing in a reducing atmosphere in which the metallic film is easily lost, and the survival of an even, unbroken iridescence across a body of this height is a measure of what the Fornaci’s kilns could do. The credit belongs jointly to Galileo Chini, who directed the decoration, and to Chino Chini, who ran the firing.
The peacock came to Chini already heavily loaded. By 1900 it had passed through the Aesthetic movement, through Whistler’s Peacock Room, through Symbolist painting, and through the European design press, and it functioned less as a bird than as a compressed sign for surface, iridescence, and display. What distinguishes Chini’s treatment is that he takes the bird’s own visual logic — the repeated eye, the fan, the graded shimmer — and makes it the organizing principle of a glaze. The luster does not illustrate iridescence; it performs it. The peacock is the one animal for which that identification between subject and ceramic surface is fully available, and Chini uses it fully.
Chini’s route to this point runs through Florence. He co-founded the manufactory L’Arte della Ceramica there in 1896 and served as its artistic director, developing the luster technique and the flattened, contour-driven ornament that would remain his idiom. The wares were noticed at once. A reviewer of the Esposizione generale italiana at Turin in 1898 singled out the room of the upholsterer Agostino Lauro, furnished with Liberty fabrics and Chini’s pottery, as evidence that a native Art Nouveau might yet emerge, and at the Paris Exposition universelle of 1900, where Italian Art Nouveau was otherwise scarcely present, Chini took a gold medal (Eidelberg, Conradsen, and Clancy 2026, pp. 165–66). Eugenia Querci traces the sources of his luster to a Renaissance inheritance, to an interest in Oriental ceramic techniques, and to the presence in Florence of William De Morgan, the English ceramist close to Morris and a collaborator of Cantagalli; the genealogy is Florentine and English, not Eastern in any biographical sense. Chini left L’Arte della Ceramica in 1904, and in 1906 opened the Fornaci San Lorenzo in the Mugello with his cousin Chino, producing ceramics, stained glass, and architectural decoration, and specializing above all, in Querci’s account, in metallic luster. The firm found an international market quickly, with Tiffany acting as its agent in New York, and went on to large architectural commissions including the Terme Tamerici at Montecatini in 1910. The present vase belongs to the first years of that enterprise.
The dating of the design is documented with unusual fullness, and the documentation requires care. Chini’s autograph study for the peacock design survives in the Chini family collection, assigned to c. 1906–1911 and bearing the number that recurs on the present vase. Two further examples of the design are published: the vase in the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, whose conception is placed at c. 1906–1911 and whose execution at c. 1919–1925, and the example published by Daniele Galleni, dated 1906–1909 in conception and 1919–1930 in execution. Both catalogs separate the conception of the design, in the Fornaci’s first years, from the execution of those particular pieces a decade and more later, and both late executions are confirmed by their marks, which carry the firm’s legend of c. 1919–1940, “CHINI. E. Co (MUGELLO) ITALIA,” within and below an encircled device.
The present example is marked differently. Its base carries the Fornaci’s first mark — the bare gridiron and lily with “MVGELLO” and a single number, without ring, legend, or country of origin — a form that the Faenza marks concordance places in c. 1906–1910, and that the museum’s own catalog entries treat the same way, assigning the pieces in its collection that bear it to c. 1906–1911. On that evidence this vase was executed within the design’s first production period, and it appears to precede both published examples. The number is consistent with this. It stands alone, in the manner of the early mark rather than the paired form of the later one; 2073 sits below the 2287 that the concordance records with the early mark, while the Faenza example carries 2386 with the late one; and it falls among the lowest decoration numbers recorded on published pieces from the Fornaci, beside 2042 (a vase with peacocks and pomegranates) and 2079 (a vase with fish), both of them designs assigned to the same first years, while the pieces executed after 1919 carry numbers in the 2300s and above. The sequence is treated as corroboration rather than proof, since workshop numbering need not be strictly linear and the mark chronology is itself given in the literature as approximate; but mark, number, and the documented conception date of the design agree, and the execution is accordingly given as c. 1906–1910.
The Eastern element in the decoration should be described with the same care. The asymmetry of the composition, the reliance on contour and pattern rather than modeling, and the treatment of the ground as an atmospheric field are conventions available to any European designer working after three decades of Japonisme, and Chini had absorbed them well before 1906. His celebrated engagement with Siam — the contract signed in Florence in 1910, the voyage in 1911, the decoration of the Ananta Samakhom throne hall completed under Rama VI, the return in 1913 — transformed his later painting and his sense of color. On the dating established here it postdates this vase, and it is not treated here as a source for it. The habit in the trade literature of assigning Chini’s lusters and their orientalizing ornament to the post-Siam years describes the bulk of surviving production; it does not describe this object.
Taken together, the drawing, the ground, and the glaze describe a single decision rather than three. The contour that stands in for modeling, the under-drawn field that reads as air, and the luster that performs the plumage it depicts are one idiom, carried from L’Arte della Ceramica into the Mugello and realized here in the firm’s first years with a steadiness of firing that is the object’s quiet technical content. It is a Stile Liberty object in the fullest sense the term allows: composed before it was made, Florentine and English in its technical descent, and a peacock in its surface rather than merely on it.
Comparative Note: French Art Nouveau Ceramics and Italian Stile Liberty
The French ceramics that make up the greater part of this archive proceed from the fire. In the work of Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat, Edmond Lachenal, Auguste Delaherche, and the Saint-Amand circle around Jean Carriès, the decisive events are those that occur in the kiln: flambé and sang-de-bœuf glazes, crawled and pooled surfaces, matte enamels, the deliberate acceptance of accident. The Saint Louis catalog of the Eidelberg collection frames French innovation in exactly these terms — the adoption of stoneware as a medium for artistic expression and the advances in glaze chemistry, matte, flambé, and copper red, on display at the 1889 Exposition, with Carriès credited by contemporaries as the figure who opened the path (Eidelberg, Conradsen, and Clancy 2026, pp. 29–30). Form is frequently subordinated to that process, and the animal, when it appears, tends to be modeled in the round or to grow out of the vessel wall in relief. The resulting objects are often deliberately unlovely, and their subjects — frogs, bats, cephalopods, chimeras — are chosen partly for their capacity to unsettle.
Chini’s practice starts from drawing. He was a painter, decorator, and stage designer whose ceramic work is continuous with his mural and graphic production, and the vase is treated as a surface to be composed. The survival of his autograph study for this very design, squared for transfer and numbered for the workshop, makes the point materially: the design precedes the object, and the kiln’s task is to realize it. Color is controlled rather than courted; the luster is a demanding effect that is nonetheless specified in advance rather than discovered. Ornament is deployed across the whole field with a compositional logic that would work as readily on a wall or a poster. Stile Liberty in Chini’s hands is an architectural and decorative style before it is a ceramic one, and its ceramics reflect that priority.
The Italian prologue of the same Saint Louis catalog suggests that this was a national condition before it was a personal one. Italy, lacking both the industrial base and the state-sponsored schools and museums that drove design reform elsewhere, came late to the new style; it was absent in any force from Paris in 1900, found its footing only at the Turin exposition of 1902, and had arrived, in the authors’ phrase, through “commerce, rather than art” — through posters, advertisements, and the graphic arts (pp. 165–67). Critics abroad doubted the country was ready for it: Roger Marx, writing in the Gazette des beaux-arts as Turin was being planned, recalled the Italian section at Paris without pleasure, and Alexander Koch, in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, saw in the Turin rooms a Jugendstil caught from mediocre foreign models (pp. 166–67). A style that entered a country through the printed page, against that kind of resistance, was always likely to produce ceramics that begin with a drawing.
The contrast should not be pushed into a hierarchy, and the older habit of ranking the two traditions against each other is not useful. Both drew on the same sources — Japanese prints, Symbolist subject matter, the ambition to unify the arts of an interior — and neither is uniform: Clément Massier’s lusters at Golfe-Juan stand closer to Chini than to Dalpayrat, and Italian production includes work as sculptural as anything French. What can be said is that the two traditions locate the interest of an object in different places. The French pieces in this collection ask what a glaze can be made to do to a form. This vase asks what a surface can be made to carry.

Related Works

Within the Bestiaire the vase belongs to a group in which the animal is realized through surface rather than through form. The vessel is not shaped like a bird and incorporates no part of one; instead the finish takes on the properties of the creature depicted, until plumage and glaze become difficult to tell apart. Its nearest companion is the “Peacocks” vase of c. 1904–1905 made by the Orion metalwork factory of Georg Friedrich Schmitt in Nuremberg on a Zsolnay eosin body (Orion model 272 on Zsolnay form 7023; designer unidentified) from Pécs, Hungary (26 cm; marked “Orion” and “272” under the base), where the same identification is pursued by opposite means. There the birds are a gilt pewter mount: one peacock perched across the shoulder, a second half hidden behind, their long tails cast in relief and trailing down the body to merge into the foot, where the plumage spreads out in engraved feathers and the ocelli are set as blue glass cabochons; the Labrador eosin glaze beneath supplies the iridescence that Chini paints. On the Nuremberg vase the peacock is structure, its tails bracing the vessel like buttresses; on the Florentine vase it is surface, with nothing in relief at all. The two are the collection’s peacocks and read as a pair — one bird fastened onto a luster, one dissolved into it — and together they set the range of what a bird can be made to do to a lustered vessel. Auguste Delaherche’s plate with peacock-feather decoration marks the outer limit of the same idea, plumage without the bird.

Among the French holdings the Golfe-Juan lusters of Clément Massier are the nearest technical relations: metallic films over earthenware in which the creature is drawn and the ground made to shimmer. They are the reason the comparison between French and Italian practice drawn above cannot be reduced to glaze against drawing. The Rozenburg eggshell vase of 1903, with its exotic bird painted in contour among poppies, is the collection’s other drawn bird on a tall vessel, and the Dutch counterpart to Chini’s flattened idiom.

Outside the collection, Chini’s autograph study for the peacock design, pen and pencil squared for transfer, is preserved in the Collezione V. Chini and published in Liberty in Italia (c. 1906–1911). The number on the sheet corresponds to the 2073 painted on the base of the present vase, which accordingly realizes a documented autograph design. The Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza holds an example of the design in an amber and rose colorway, its conception placed at c. 1906–1911 and its execution at c. 1919–1925, its base carrying the firm’s late legend; a further example, in red and gold, is published by Galleni (cat. 105) with conception dated 1906–1909 and execution 1919–1930. The present vase, in green and turquoise and bearing the first-period mark, is the third recorded example and apparently the earliest in execution.

The peacock recurs across the Fornaci’s output in sibling designs — a vase with peacocks and pomegranates (decoration 2042) and a vase of peacock-feather eyes are both assigned to the same first years — and in plates and chargers into the 1920s. Comparison across them traces the movement of the motif from the Liberty idiom toward the flatter, more geometric handling of Chini’s Déco-period architectural work at Salsomaggiore.

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