Animals in relief

Bordallo's ceramics carry many modelled animals. The museum lists frogs, lizards, snakes, dragonflies, grasshoppers, butterflies, fish and lobsters. They appear as live creatures, such as birds, insects, amphibians and reptiles, and as dead food, such as fish, seafood, dried cod and game. A lizard winds casually around the neck of a calabash-shaped censer, and small frogs are applied to traditional forms. Animals also sit on lids, as with the monkey on the loquat box of 1890.

For prototypes, drawing and clay modelling from natural models, mainly plants and animals, were standard practice. Rafael made them, and so did specialist moulding workers, with the skills meant to pass on to apprentices. Surface treatment mattered too. On the dragonfly bowl of 1901 the wings are painted in majolica to imitate iridescence, and a jug with fish of the same year used muffle colours. Some large pieces were fired in reduction atmospheres, producing cracked effects. The museum calls these experiments promising but notes they were not continued after Rafael died in 1905.