Introduced to Europe in the fourteenth century, Chinese porcelains were regarded as objects of great rarity and luxury. //////The position of the wares and the neighbours :
Porcelains though, were only a small part of the trade—the cargoes were full of tea, silks, paintings, lacquerware metalwork, and ivory.
The porcelains were often stored at the lowest level of the ships, both to provide ballast and because they were impervious to water, in contrast to the even more expensive tea stored above.
READING 35-1 : Source: H. Hobhouse. 1986. Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind. Harper & Row, New York.
The words to describe it and the countries that borrowed those words:
The blue-and-white dishes that comprised such a significant proportion of the export porcelain trade became known as kraak porcelain, the term deriving from the Dutch name for caracca, the Portuguese merchant ship. Characteristic features of kraak dishes were decoration divided into panels on the wide border, and a central scene depicting a stylized landscape.
When objects are specifically made for export to the West (part one)
The examples that appeared in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were often mounted in gilt silver, which emphasized their preciousness and transformed them into entirely different objects.
By the early sixteenth century—after Portugal established trade routes to the Far East and began commercial trade with Asia—Chinese potters began to produce objects specifically for export to the West and porcelains began to arrive in some quantity. An unusually early example of export porcelain is a ewer decorated with the royal arms of Portugal; the arms are painted upside down, however—a reflection of the unfamiliarity of the Chinese with the symbols and customs of their new trading partner.
I wonder what the painter was thinking.
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text source: http://www.metmuseum.org/
image source : http://www.hort.purdue.edu/
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