Italian Sponge-Decorated Blue and White Charger, Hand-Sponged Across the Whole Face, Impressed Crook-and-Star Mark, c. 1965–1985

The Piece

A wide shallow charger, sponged in strong blue over white across its entire face.

The form is simple and clean: a recessed foot ring, a wall that rises in one unbroken curve, and a plain unmoulded rim. It is broad and low — more platter than bowl, with just enough depth to hold.

The decoration covers the whole interior. A mid-blue laid on with a sponge, dense and reticulated, running right out over the rim, heavier where the sponge was freshly loaded and drier and more open where it was running out. Nothing repeats anywhere on the piece.

The outside is plain white and glossy.

The base is glazed white, and inside the foot ring sits a mark moulded into the body itself: a shepherd's crook beside a small star, with MADE IN ITALY arched beneath it.

History & Provenance

Sponging is the one decorating technique that cannot be faked into uniformity. Every piece is dressed individually by hand, and the sponge itself changes as it goes — it loads, it gives up colour, it dries, it gets reloaded. Follow the blue around the rim of this charger and you can read the whole circuit: the dense passage where the sponge was wet, the thinning through the middle of each sweep, the point where the decorator went back to the colour. No two pieces off the same bench look alike, and this one has no repeat anywhere in it.

The mark was cut into the mould, not printed onto the piece. That is a meaningful difference. A printed backstamp is applied to a fired pot as a separate operation; a moulded mark is part of the form itself, pressed into wet clay, and every piece out of that mould carries it identically. It is also distinct from the adhesive foil label that came to dominate later Italian export ware — a label falls off, and a moulded mark cannot.

“MADE IN ITALY” is a customs statement, not a signature. The English wording is there because the piece was made to cross a border into an English-speaking market; country-of-origin marking in the importing country's language has been the requirement for export goods since the early twentieth century. It tells you where the charger was made and that it was always intended to be sold abroad.

The crook-and-star device is not identified to a workshop, and no attribution is made here. What the mark does establish, in the body of the piece and beyond argument, is that it was made in Italy for export. It is offered unattributed as to maker.

Dated on the moulded in-body country mark, the thin high-fired white body, the plain unmoulded rim and the hand sponging: c. 1965–1985.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A charger is the most quietly useful large plate there is, because its job is never to hold the food — it is to frame whatever you put on top of it.

Set a white bowl of pasta in the middle of this one and the blue does all the work around it. Stand a cake stand on it, or a tureen, or a pitcher of branches, and the same thing happens: the object in the centre gets a border and suddenly looks arranged. For a table with nothing else going on, one charger in the centre is the whole scheme.

Used on its own it is a serving piece with real capacity — a salad for six, roasted vegetables, bread, fruit, a spread of cheese. The low sides mean everything on it stays visible, which is the point of serving from a charger rather than a bowl.

And it hangs. Blue and white on a wall is a scheme that has never gone out in three hundred years, and it works over a sideboard, in a kitchen, up a staircase, or leaned on a dresser shelf. Against dark wood it reads bright; against a painted wall it reads calm.

The pattern is the argument for buying this one rather than a new one. A machine-printed blue is regular, and you see the repeat within a few seconds. This is one person's hand going round a plate once, and there is nowhere on it where the pattern doubles back on itself.

A note on care. Hand wash it. The piece is glazed inside and out and takes ordinary food use without trouble, but a dishwasher's heat, harsh detergent and long dry cycle are hard on any hand-decorated ware and will dull the blue over time. Warm water, a soft cloth, dried straight away.

Skip the microwave, and do not take it from a cold cupboard to a hot oven or the other way round — a wide thin piece takes temperature shock worse than a thick narrow one.

If you hang it, use a coated spring-wire hanger sized to the plate rather than an adhesive disc, and if you stack other plates on it put felt or paper between them; the glaze is hard but the rim is the part that gets marked.