The Chronology of the Bellarmine Jug
by: Anthony Thwaite
(all images are clickable)

‘The art of procelain’, wrote W.B. Honey, referring particularly to eighteenth-century German porcelain, ‘was essentially a luxury art, depending on the patronage of a wealthy class, remote from all concern with the harsher realities of existence’. The art of the German stoneware potter was the polar opposite of this. Whatever his pretensions as an artist, he was primarily an artisan making objects for common use among, at best, the higher class. The consequence has been that excessive attention has been given to the products of a few stoneware potters, such a Jan Emens, who tried to transcend this utilitarian mould, while the great bulk of the ware has (with the exception of a few scholars, such as Koetschau, Von Falke, Klein and Von Bock) been largely ignored, except in recent years by archaeologists; and even here the chronology and typology of forms have been so riddled with conflicting dogmas that little clear sense has emerged.

Among all the German stoneware forms, the commonest and most widely dispersed (examples have been found throughout Britain and Western Europe, in the West and East Indies, and in North America) is the so-called bellarmine or greybeard, known in Germany as the Bartmann or Bartmannzeug. It is indeed the bearded face or mask, generally on the neck of the bottle, opposite the handle and below the bottom rim of the lip, which makes them distinctive. They are almost always salt-glazed, vary in height between about 4 inches and about 22 inches, and were chiefly used in taverns as decanters between the cask and the table, though their use as domestic storage jugs for acids, vinegar, oil and even mercury, is also attested. The smaller ones were probably drinking mugs.

1. Neck fragment of salt-glaze figure jug excavated in Norwich. Norwich Museum

This much is common knowledge among ceramic historians, curators, connoisseurs and dealers. But the facts about this ubiquitous vessel rapidly become problematical. For example, where and when were they first made? The workshops in the Maximinenstrasse in Cologne, between 1520 and 1540, is the usual answer; but there is no firm evidence to confirm this particular site or this range of dates. Certainly bellarmines of ‘early’ times were made in Cologne, in the Maximinenstrasse and the Komoedienstrasse; but Siegburg, where stoneware was being manufactured from the early fourteenth century, may have its proper claims, particularly when one looks at those ‘early’ examples with thumbed or pinched feet, a characteristic of several Siegburg forms. A neck fragment of what might be called an Ur-bellarmine was found in association with much Siegburg pottery on the site of the Corn Hall, Exchange Street, in Norwich in 1964(No. 1).

One undoubted fact is that Rhineland bellarmines formed part of a thriving export trade, via the river port of Cologne and thence to the Netherlands ports, from at least the middle of the sixteenth century, if not before. It is these exported bellarmines, now chiefly in collections in Britain and to a smaller extent the United States, with which I am most familiar. Though naturally not every such example was a contemporary export, some of them having been purchased later in Continental sales or acquired from Continental collectors, the majority have as their find-spot the country in which they now are.

Both the earliest known bellarmine carrying a date (1550) and the latest (1764) are in British collections. Within this period of 200-odd years, I have recorded over 80 dated examples. These of course represent only a very small proportion of all surviving bellarmines; yet though one must be properly sceptical about the accuracy of their dates, they at least begin to give one a framework for attempting to trace the evolution of the form. Studied in conjunction with the documents and literature of the period, and with the added evidence of their appearance in dated contemporary paintings (particularly those of the Netherlandish genre painters), these examples may help to establish a chronology.

The pioneer work of M. R. Holmes enthusiastically and learnedly drew attention to the possibilities of a chronology in a way that had not been attempted before; but his concentration on mask-forms and (less extensively) medallion-forms to the virtual exclusion of all other details limits his typological usefulness, and his sparse noting of dated examples further disables his work. Nevertheless, a surprising number of museums and archaeological publications, together with those auction rooms and dealers who take any interest in the objects, still give such citations as ‘Holmes Type VI’ with slavish and mechanical regularity, as if that settled the matter.