Bordalo Pinheiro’s Horn of Plenty

When people speak of Portuguese ceramics, they mostly imagine a blue monochrome pattern on white: the refined color of the waves ruffling the country’s ocean. Yet to say that the sea is blue – or white when it breaks into foam – is oversimplifying. Dawn and sunset set it afire; a storm turns it to lead; night darkens it to obsidian. Beneath that glazed marine surface, moreover, the sea’s depths teem with life in countless forms and colors. But there is another Portuguese ceramic tradition fully cognizant of this fact, one that is baroque in both color and form. Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro is its great paladin. Giorgio Villani rightly calls him “a volcano crafting a thousand painstaking sparks,” and describes his plates and baskets, alive with food and creatures, as overturned cornucopias from which eels and tentacles spill, like the strange monstrosities that issue from the mouths of wicked stepsisters punished by good fairies. This article, through the lens of Manfredi Gioacchini, spreads before us a basket of many baskets, a platter of many platters, a cornucopia of many cornucopias.