The Thymiaterion: The Ancient Inspiration Behind the Ruvo, Egnazia and Daunia Lamps

We've long had a soft spot for the thymiaterion — the incense burner of the ancient Mediterranean, and, we'd argue, one of antiquity's most elegant everyday objects. It's also, when you think about it, the natural ancestor of a table lamp: a tall, upright form whose entire purpose was to animate a room, once with fragrant smoke and now, in our version, with light. That resemblance is what led us to base a small collection of lamps on the form — the Ruvo, the Egnazia and the Daunia — each one drawn from a different strand of ancient Apulian pottery.

The word itself comes from the Greek thymiaein, "to burn incense." Herodotus is the first to write of the type by name, in the 5th century BC, though the object predates him — Phoenician incense burners survive from as early as the 10th century BC, and the form is generally thought to have travelled to Greece and its colonies by way of Cyprus. In shape it is disarmingly simple: a stemmed foot for stability, a tall shaft, and a shallow bowl at the top, in which resin was left to smoulder.

Thymiateria appear in temples and sanctuaries, at weddings, and — especially in Etruria and Magna Graecia — in the tomb, laid beside the dead as part of the funerary rite. The Etruscans made particularly fine bronze examples, often with a nude youth or a standing priestess holding the bowl aloft. Greek and South Italian workshops tended to work in terracotta instead, sometimes painted to look like metal, and it is this Italian, largely Apulian, branch of the tradition that gives our three lamps their character. The Metropolitan Museum holds some fine examples of both Daunian and Gnathian pottery thymiateria, as well as Etruscan ones in bronze.

Apulia — the heel of Italy, and once one of the richest corners of Magna Graecia — has been giving up thymiateria and painted pottery from its tombs since the early 19th century, when excavations around Ruvo, Canosa, Taranto and Egnazia brought a great deal of it to light. Each of our lamps borrows from a different regional style, rather than copying any single vessel.

The Ruvo lamp takes its decoration from the red-figure ware associated with Ruvo di Puglia, ancient Rubi. Much of what came out of the town's tombs is now held at the Jatta National Archaeological Museum there, assembled in the 19th century by the brothers Giovanni and Giulio Jatta and still arranged today as they left it — the only museum in Italy to have preserved a private collection this way. We find something rather moving in the fact that a whole room of objects is being kept exactly as two brothers once chose to display them.

The Egnazia lamp follows the pattern of Gnathia ware, named for the ancient town of Gnathia — Egnazia today — on the Adriatic coast south of Bari. It is a glossy black-glazed pottery, its decoration painted directly over the glaze in white, yellow and a deep purplish-red: vines, garlands, small figures, the odd theatrical scene. Production is generally dated from around 370 to 272 BC, with Taranto as the main centre and Egnazia and Canosa producing their own. It remains, to our eye, one of the more painterly and playful of the Apulian wares, which is why it seemed the right choice for a lamp meant to catch the light.

The Daunia lamp looks furthest back of the three, to the geometric pottery made from around 600 BC by the Iapygian people of Daunia, the region of northern Apulia around Canosa. Rather than figures, its decoration — known as listata ware — runs in horizontal bands of waves, triangles and small chained flowers, disciplined and rhythmic in a way we find quite hypnotic close up. A Daunian thymiaterion in exactly this style is held at the Museo Archeologico Provinciale 'Sigismondo Castromediano' in Lecce — Puglia's oldest museum, founded in 1868 by Sigismondo Castromediano, Duke of Cavallino — where we first saw it.

Each base is thrown on the wheel and painted freehand by a family of Apulian potters we've worked with for some time now — the current, second generation, who inherited the knowledge, the secrets of production, and the precise design language directly from their father. Nothing is stamped or cast. A band may wander very slightly, a meander may not quite close as precisely as its neighbour, and we've come to think of that as part of the charm rather than a flaw to be corrected. No two lamps, even sold as a pair, are ever exactly alike — much like the ancient vessels that inspired them.

The Ruvo, Egnazia and Daunia lamps are each offered as a pair, priced at £2,600, with three to six weeks needed to complete an order. Each will be wired for the country of destination and, within reason, can be adjusted to a client's particular request.