About the iconography.

[DRAFT, please review and edit. This page is meant to read like a thoughtful essay from the maker, not marketing copy.]

The Della Robbia workshops, Florence, fifteenth century.

Luca della Robbia and his nephew Andrea ran a workshop in Florence that solved a problem the quattrocento was preoccupied with: how to make sacred imagery durable, weather-resistant, and reproducible without losing the hand of the artist. Their answer was glazed terracotta, tin-white grounds, cobalt-blue Madonnas, deep iron-yellow halos, and the famous ghirlanda of fruits and leaves around a tondo of Mary and the Child. You can still see them on the walls of churches and hospitals all over Tuscany, six hundred years in. They were the first answer to the question this studio also asks: can a tile carry the weight of an icon?

The Marian work in this studio, particularly the round tondos and the fruit-bordered tiles, takes its grammar from the Della Robbia. The cobalt-and-tin palette is the same. The glaze chemistry is updated for cone-10 gas reduction, which is how the studio fires; the visual effect is intentionally close.

The Spanish & Portuguese azulejo.

Azulejo tile work, from Andalusia through Portugal and into colonial Mexico, took a different path. Where the Della Robbia made free-standing devotional objects, the azulejo tradition made surfaces: cloister walls, refectory baseboards, retablos behind altars, the entryways of homes. The iconography is bolder, the line work freer, and the typical palette is cobalt-blue on tin-white with sparing additions of yellow and green. Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Sacred Heart, and the saints all show up on azulejos that have warmed parish walls for four centuries.

The studio’s tile work, especially the holy water font surrounds and the patron-saint tiles, draws directly on this lineage. The blues are the same blues. The line is the same kind of confident, slightly imperfect hand-drawn line.

The Eastern icon tradition: light, gold, and theology.

Eastern Christian iconography is not, properly speaking, a style: it is a theology. An icon is written, not painted; the gold ground is not decoration but an image of uncreated light; the figures are stylized because they are meant to point past themselves to what they represent. The Roman Catholic Church receives this tradition fully, the Council of Nicaea II (787) settled the question for both lungs of the Church.

The studio’s use of gold luster, on halos, on chalice bands, on the rays of the Sacred Heart, reaches for that same theology. Gold luster is fired separately at a lower temperature in a third pass through the kiln, which is more or less how the East has done it for a thousand years. The piece is finished but not closed: it is meant to be looked through.

The Sacred Heart, in clay.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as we have received it through St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the apparitions at Paray-le-Monial, has its own iconographic language: the heart pierced and bound with thorns, the cross rising from its wound, the flame of love. In paint and on holy cards the iconography is fixed. In clay it has been less fixed, which is part of what makes the studio’s Sacred Heart work feel new.

The rich iron-reds of the Sacred Heart pieces come from gas-reduction firing: the kiln is starved of oxygen at temperature, the iron in the clay and the copper in the glazes are reduced to lower oxidation states, and what comes out is a red that no electric kiln can quite reach. This is the firing the Sacred Heart wanted.

Romanesque tympana and the rural French church.

The carved stone tympana over the doorways of small French Romanesque churches, Christ in Majesty surrounded by the Tetramorph, the hierarchies of angels, the Last Judgment over a worn lintel, are another room the work tries to belong to. Romanesque iconography is pre-Gothic, pre-naturalistic; it is hieratic, schematic, and unembarrassed about being a teaching image as much as an art image. Several of the studio’s smaller pieces, particularly Guardian Angel tiles and the Christ Pantocrator tondos, pull from this tradition.

Why this matters for what you buy.

A tile from this studio is not a pretty image of a saint. It is an attempt to put a piece of sacred art, researched, painted by hand, fired with care, on the wall of your home, in the line of fifteen hundred years of Catholic devotional craft. That is the work, and that is why it costs what it costs.

From the studio