Baked earth has shaped sculpture and buildings across five millennia
Terracotta means cooked earth: ordinary clay fired at fairly low heat, typically around 1,000 °C. Iron oxides in the clay react with oxygen in the kiln and turn it the familiar reddish brown, though it can come out yellow, buff, pink or grey. Cheap and easy to model, it has served sculptors everywhere.
Some of the oldest examples are female figurines from Mohenjo-daro, dating from 3000 to 1500 BCE and probably tied to a fertility cult. Mesopotamia produced the Burney Relief around 1950 BCE, Egyptians made funerary ushabti figures from it, and most Olmec figurines in Mesoamerica are terracotta too. In West Africa the Nok culture and the Ife-Benin tradition of Nigeria modelled remarkably naturalistic heads, traditions that later fed into their famous bronze and brass work.
China used the material from very early on. The Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang is the best-known example, though it was somewhat unusual for its time, when reliefs were more common. In Greece, mould-made Tanagra figurines were affordable ornaments in the Hellenistic period, while Etruscan sculptors preferred terracotta to stone even for near life-size statues such as the Apollo of Veii. Indian makers developed their own methods; Satavahana artisans pressed clay into separate front and back moulds and joined them, leaving hollow figures.
Medieval Europe largely ignored the medium until German workshops revived it in the late 14th century. In Florence, Luca della Robbia founded a family business in glazed and painted roundels for church facades, and Giovanni da Maiano supplied busts of Roman emperors to Hampton Court in 1521. By the 18th century artists such as Clodion liked it because it allowed quick, spontaneous portraits.
Buildings are the other big story. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, North American cities wanted fireproof cladding, and terracotta facades stayed fashionable into the early 1900s until modernist concrete and glass pushed them aside from the 1930s. In India, Bishnupur's temples and the Bankura Horse keep the craft alive.
Source: Terracotta
