Decorative Arts

Majolica: Named After a 400-Year-Older Technique It Never Used

Victorian majolica glaze is not the Italian Renaissance technique its name borrows. The V&A's record for it calls the resemblance 'inspired by,' not the same process.

Pattern in Art: A 1453 Tiling That Beat Physics by Five Centuries

A 15th-century Isfahan tiling matches a geometry physicists could not formalize until the 1970s. Whether it is truly a quasicrystal is still disputed in print.

Why the Best Byzantine Mosaics Survive in Italy

Hagia Sophia's original gold mosaics were destroyed in the Iconoclasm. The best 6th-century survivors instead sit in a Ravenna church that had already left Byzantine rule.