Renaissance potters were nanotechnologists: Tiny metal particles give 15th century Italian ceramics lustre.

Renaissance potters were nanotechnologists: Tiny metal particles give 15th century Italian ceramics lustre.

Coloured glazes in pottery samples from the Umbrian town of Deruta exploit the reflective properties of minute metal grains to give them a rich lustre, Bruno Brunetti of the University of Perugia and colleagues find.

At its peak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the finely painted ceramics of the Deruta pottery industry were in demand all over Europe.

Glazes are basically thin films of coloured glass. Metal salts give colour to a glassy matrix produced by fusing sand alkalis such as soda in the heat of a kiln. Coloured glazes - such as blue-glazed stone carvings from the Middle East - have been around since at least 4500 BC.