Brief Tile History

Some 20,000 years ago we have the first record of fired ceramics. Not until the Middle Eastern Neolithic age, some 6000-7000BC, when organized settlements were more com­ mon, was fired ceramic in general use in areas such as Turkey and Israel. While sun-baked clay bricks had been used for centuries for building, it was not until 3000bc that fired bricks were first used. This came about when farming communities had developed into true empires of organized power. Because of the easy availability of clay, bricks became an important material for architectural construction, being used in temples, mosques and churches from Morocco to Iran and most Mediterranean countries. The first record we have of glazed tiles being used in architecture, as wall cladding, was in 2700bc in Egypt. Turquoise blue glazed tiles or slabs were used extensively in the stepped pyramid of Saqqara, which was built for Pharaoh Djoser. Again, the city of Pi- Ramesses was famous as 'The Turquoise City, where thousands of blue glazed tiles clad the gates and windows of many buildings. Apart from this, tiles were not used extensively and the Egyptians were more interested in small glazed objects than wall cladding. By the end of the third millennium bc, glaze was in use in Mesopotamia, where later glazed polychrome tiles and decorative glazed bricks were a feature of architecture. Slowly these influences moved westwards as far as Morocco, which was then the limit of the known world.

Between the thirteenth and fifth centuries bc, impressive glazed relief tiles and brick were used by the Assyrians and Babylonians in Mesopotamia. The famous Ishtar Gate and Processional Way of Babylon were constructed around 580bc. Almost 200 years later, following Alexander the Great's Eastern conquests, there was a decline in certain building techniques.

Tile producing techniques were pioneered in Mesopotamia, but it was not until the flowering of Islamic art and architecture after ad 700 that the influence of Islamic tiles and architecture spread from Syria via North Africa to Morocco and Spain. The Islamic influence, which ran AD750-1300 in Iran, AD750-1600 in North Africa and ad 1326 to the 1850s in Turkey, was a great unifying force in cultural terms. It was not until the twelfth century that tiles as wall decoration were used extensively in the Middle East.

This rich heritage of ceramic tiling did not accompany the westward spread of the Roman Empire in Europe, except for mosaic flooring, which was much used in Italy. While marble and stone were used for mosaic in Italy, ceramic mosaic was more in evidence in their buildings in Britain, where terracotta was a substitute for red marble. Bricks and terracotta for paviours, drainage and roof tiles were a strong element in Roman construction in Britain.

Tiles for flooring were more European than Middle Eastern, where rugs were used extensively. In the fourteenth century in Southern Spain, the making of glazed-tile mosaics of various sizes and shapes for walls had been developed to its full potential. By the sixteenth century, this labour intensive technique was being imitated by Spanish tile makers much more cheaply by using a method called curda seca (dry cord), which had been used by Moorish potters for some time. This technique was developed to prevent various areas of coloured glaze from blending or mixing during firing. The curda seca was composed of iron oxide and grease, which when painted in fine lines on a biscuit tile kept the areas of applied coloured glaze apart during firing. This gave the effect of an area of coloured mosaic of various shapes without all the labour of making individual pieces of mosaic and having to fix them individually. This was later followed by a technique called cuenca, where lines outlining the design were incised into a tile mould, which when pressed gave raised outlines to the tile. Areas were then filled in with coloured glazes, thus preventing blending. Besides cuerca seca and cuenca, the Hispano-Moresque tradition of lustre painting was practised mainly in Valencia having been first used in the fifteenth century. From here tiles were exported to Italy in the late fifteenth century, where they were called majolica, which became an Italian speciality. Before long the strong architectural importance of majolica on Italian architecture began to spread westward into Europe.

By about 1500 an Italian majolica maker was operating in Seville, where he had much more freedom to design tiles and schemes for buildings and thus executed some large and ambitious projects. In 1512, a majolica workshop was operating in Lyons and, though the work was Italian directed, the results were thoroughly French.

Colourful majolica tiles were being produced in northern Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Italian potters at Antwerp in Flanders. Some of these tiles reached England and were used in the chapel of the Vyne, near Basingstoke.

Considerable unrest between Flanders, which was Catholic, and Holland, which was Protestant, caused many of the tile-makers to flee to Holland, where they established their workshops in Rotterdam, Delft, Haarlem, Utrecht and as far north as Makkum in Friesland. A distinct change in style occurred between 1620 and 1640 when Dutch sea- traders brought back examples of blue and white Chinese porcelain. Colourful majolica tile production was slowly replaced by blue and white tiles, which soon became the hallmark of Dutch tiles and especially Delftware. These designs in turn inspired the production of English Delft and Portuguese blue and white tiles. It is interesting to note that the Portuguese blue and white tile-painters were less lively and elegant in their brush work than the Dutch decorators.