Pottery and Porcelain Club Lecture

Dr. Walter Denny presents a lecture entitled “Orientalist Ceramics: Images and Impact of the Islamic Orient and the European Arts of Fire.”  From maiolica depictions of Turks to the figurines of Meissen, from the fifteenth-century potters of Genoa to the great 19th-century European artist potters such as Vilmos Zsolnay, William de Morgan, and Theodore Deck, the ceramics of the Islamic world have exercised an almost hypnotic fascination over the centuries.  From style to technique, this illustrated talk examines the significant impact of Islamic ceramics from Spain to Iran on the ceramic art of Europe over the past half-millennium.
Dr. Walter Denny is a professor emeritus at UMass Amherst, specializing in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, in particular the artistic traditions of the Ottoman Turks, Islamic carpets and textiles, Islamic imagery in European art, and issues of economics and patronage in Islamic art.  He is the author of a number of publications on Islamic art and served as Senior Scholar in Residence in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2007 to 2017.  
Sponsored by the Pottery and Porcelain Club.  Free and open to the public.