Italian Hand-Painted Baroque Scrollwork Coffee Service

The glossy black glaze catches the light like lacquer, making the warm yellow scrolls and pale green foliage rise vividly from the rounded forms. This is a hand-painted Sicilian pottery coffee or demitasse service, marked in painted script “S.C.G. Caltagirone / Made in Italy” beneath the principal pieces. The service includes a lidded coffee pot, covered sugar bowl, four small cups, and matching saucers, all decorated with a bold Italian Baroque-revival foliate pattern. Made in Caltagirone between the 1950s and 1970s.  Caltagirone had been Sicily’s principal ceramics center since the medieval Islamic period, and its workshops became especially celebrated for colorful maiolica intended for both local domestic use and the postwar tourist and export markets. Such richly ornamented tablewares draw on the Sicilian island’s layered Spanish, Arab, and Italian decorative traditions. Traditional maiolica involves coating earthenware with an opaque, white tin glaze before decoration and firing; this process provides the luminous ground that allows painted colors to remain crisp. Collectors will appreciate the coherent matching service and unusually dramatic black-ground palette. There is visible chipping and rubbing around several unglazed foot rims, and also small chips pictured.