WHAT IS THE FAIENCE ?

1. A name used for the medieval pottery of Faenza in northern Italy, one of the chief seats of the ceramics industry in the 16th century; it was an early type of majolica. 2. It is also used for the tin-glazed earthenware made in France, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia as distinguished from Faenza majolica, and that made in the Netherlands and England, which is called delft. 3. Most accurately, it is the primitive form of glass developed in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium bc and then, almost as early, in Egypt; it is sometimes called Egyptian faience. It is a substance composed of a sand and clay mixture baked to a temperature at which the surface begins to fuse to a bluish or greenish glass. It was colored with copper salts to produce a blue-green finish and used especially for beads and figurines, particularly in the second millennium bc. Its main use in the Bronze Age was for beads, seals, figurines, and similar small objects. The glazed material could be comprised of a base of either carved steatite (soapstone) or molded clay with a core of crushed quartz (or quartz and soda-lime) fired so that the surface fuses into a glassy coating. Examples occur also in Bronze Age contexts in Europe, including the Wessex culture.