Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Fine and Decorative Art and Design
Abstract
This dissertation explores the Bloomsbury Group’s engagement with Italian decorative arts, with a focus on the ceramics of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Phyllis Keyes. Despite ongoing debate surrounding the group’s boundaries and practices, their ceramic production reveals a deliberate reinterpretation of historical motifs, particularly Italian tin-glazed earthenware, or maiolica. By drawing on the Italian belle donne tradition and Mediterranean design principles, Bloomsbury artists adapted historical forms to articulate a modernist vision of aesthetic innovation, social critique, and nonconformity. Bloomsbury ceramics are situated within a longer British fascination with Italian art, shaped by Grand Tour practices, historical collecting, and the circulation of printed visual resources. Italian ‘primitive’ art offered a conceptual framework through which the group could negotiate questions of identity, cultural continuity, and artistic renewal during the upheavals of the early twentieth-century. Comparative analysis with historical examples in British collections, alongside study of specific commissions, demonstrates how Bloomsbury’s adoption of Mediterranean motifs was simultaneously reverential and transformative, preserving the visual authority of the Italian Renaissance while reframing it to express modernist ideals. This research argues that Bloomsbury ceramics exemplify the transhistorical and transnational dialogues central to modernism, showing how historical models were appropriated to negotiate contemporary artistic, social, and philosophical concerns.
Recommended Citation
Mansfield, Abigail, "From Renaissance to Modernism: Design Conventions of Italian Maiolica in the Ceramic Output of the Bloomsbury Group" (2026). MA in Fine and Decorative Art and Design Dissertations. 6.
https://digitalcommons.sia.edu/ma_fine_ad/6