“At Toledo and Seville, the cuenca method of managing the glaze, comparable to enamelling in champlevé technique, rapidly supplanted the cuerda seca during the early 16th century.  Before firing, slabs of clay were impressed with moulds that produced hollows defined sharply by outlines in sharp relief.  The depressions, like little bowls, held the glazes, while the arrises barred the several colours from intermingling.

The individual patterns used on cuenca tiles were confined to the limits of one, two or four tiles, but the numbers of these patterns seem endless, some based on Moresque geometric forms, interwoven bands and stars, others on Gothic tracery, flowers and animals, and even more on the motifs of the early Spanish Renaissance.  Cuenca tiles served as high wainscots in religious and civil buildings and in salons, patios, and balconies of palaces like the Casa de Pilatos, Seville.  For pavements, small cuenca-glazed squares were combined often with tiles of red terracotta.  Frequently, rectangular tiles, paired to form a large square, were set between the wooden beams of ceilings.

At the time of their greatest popularity, cuenca tiles were exported to Portugal, the West Indies and Italy.  Myriads of them were made for buildings in regions where a Muslim influence in decoration remained strong.  As restorations for dados and pavements in the Alhambra, they replaced damaged tile mosaics, their pattern imitating geometrical forms in Moresque style.

The art and methods of Italian maiolica-painters reached Seville with the arrival of one Francisco Niculoso.  This man, who signed himself ‘the Italian’, or again, ‘the Pisan’, left Italy for Spain before the year 1500, predating the emigrations of Italian potters to Antwerp and Lyons.  Although he may have been a Pisan, as he claimed, Niculoso probably studied at Faenza, since he followed the Faventine manner of painting with strong dark blue and black outlines on a white or yellow surface, filling in areas with a maze of cross-hatching, graining, and stipple.  The colours, too were Italian, deep orange, lemon-yellow, purple that could be paled to mauve, tawny brown, and brilliant greens.  His religious compositions were based on engravings or prayer-book illustrations, and his ornamental designs in Renaissance style on the decorative prints of the Italian artists, Nicoletto Rosex da Modena, Zoan Andrea and Giovanni Antonio da Brescia.

Niculoso’s picture-tiles, bearing dates between 1503 and 1520, cover the vertical surfaces of altar-pieces, altar frontals, wall-tombs, and doorways.  Although accustomed in Italy to wall-plaques painted with religious and mythological subjects, he probably knew nothing of the vast wainscots of tile and tile-mosaics that had decorated Andalusian buildings for centuries.  Upon his arrival at Seville, then, he must have conceived the idea of adapting maiolica-painting to architectural surfaces faced with tiles.

An important work of great beauty is his altar of The Visitation made in 1504 for the royal oratory in the Alcázar, Seville, and there is also a small, twelve-tile panel of the same subject signed by him.  The Church portal of Santa Paula is perhaps his most elaborate composition, yet the tremendous altar-piece done in 1518 for the Monastery of Santa Maria de Tentudía (Badajoz) is a masterpiece, depicting in seven scenes the life of the Virgin, a miracle performed by her at Tentuda, and the vicar’s portrait.  Except for a son, Juan Bautista, Niculoso left no pupils to carry on his style of tile decoration at Seville.  Attributed to the younger Niculoso are five panels portraying saints, of which St John is one.

For a period of about thirty years after Francisco Niculoso’s death in 1529, Spanish potters reverted completely to the cuenca tradition.  In mid-century, however, a new stimulus brought back to the Hispanic peninsula the Italian style of maiolica-painting.  This time, the efforts of Italo-Flemish potters from Antwerp were combined with those of Italians emigrating directly from Genoa and Albisola to revive a pictorial type of decoration similar to Niculoso’s.

The appearance pf Antwerp tile-masters who planned to work in Spain began in the early 1560’s when Juan Flores (Jan Floris) settled at Plasencia and Frans Andries went southward to Seville (1561) under contract to work for a year and a half in a factory at Triana.  From Andries, the Sevillian potters learned the art of maiolica-painting and how to mix Italian glaze-colours.  His methods influenced greatly the work of many tile-makers at Triana, among them Roque Hernández and his brother-in-law, Cristóbal de Augusta, whose tile wainscots in the Alcázar, signed and dated 1577-78, were designed to imitate Flemish tapestries.  Instead of painting picture-panels like the Italo-Flemish masters, many of the native potters held to their tradition of purely decorative motifs.  Designs differ from one panel to another, each being separated by borders of Italian Renaissance patterns mixed with Flemish strapwork and masks.

Genoese potters, Tommaso Pesaro and his company of workmen, brought with them the particular styles of Genoa and Albisola in maiolica-painting.  They settled in Seville about 1570, to be followed somewhat later by several more Ligurians, who were said to have worked in the ‘Venetian manner’.  Two of these men, Antonio and Bartolommeo Zambarino, whose father had come from Albisola, supplied painted tiles between 1584 and 1593 for the Alcázar and the cathedral at Seville.”

World Ceramics: An illustrated history edited by Robert J. Charleston (pg. 163-165)

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