Majolica — tin-glazed earthenware painted with rich, opaque colours, originating in Islamic and Italian renaissance traditions — appears in poems about the decorative arts of the Mediterranean as a surface of painted narrative; The Italian Renaissance majolica dishes painted with scenes from Ovid or the Bible — called "istoriato" ware — give poets an ekphrastic tradition: the same stories told in paint on clay that poets tell in verse; Victorian majolica — the moulded, brightly glazed earthenware of Minton, George Jones, and others — appears in poems about the Great Exhibition and the Victorian passion for the elaborately decorative; A poem about a Raphael room at Urbino might describe majolica plates bearing the same subjects as the paintings above them: "the same Venus, the same Judgement, the same gods — translated from wall to table, from fresco to glaze"; In a poem about a garden, a Victorian majolica jardiniÁ¨re — moulded with water lilies and supported by herons — stands as an emblem of nature elaborately controlled; Keats's "Lamia" world — sensuous, coloured, slightly dangerous — might include majolica as part of its over-ripe interior.