In Fez, a zellige craftsman starts with a glazed square of clay about ten centimeters across and breaks it into a star, a lozenge or a sliver of almost nothing, using a small hammer with a sharpened edge. Hundreds of those pieces are then laid face down, like a puzzle assembled from behind, and backed with plaster. Moroccan zellige, Portuguese azulejo and Dutch Delft tiles all began as ways to make a wall last. They ended up as some of the most legible storytelling surfaces humans have ever built.
We think of tile as a finish. The people who made these traditions thought of it as a record.
Zellige, cut from the glaze
The word is usually traced to the Arabic verb zalaja, “to slide,” a nod to that slick glazed face. The technique moved west across North Africa and al-Andalus, and the minaret tiles of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh, from the middle of the 12th century, are considered the earliest reliably dated zellige in Morocco. By the first half of the 14th century the complex star compositions we picture today were everywhere from Fez to Granada.
Those patterns are built on tessellation, which means they could, in principle, run forever. Twelve-pointed stars hold eight-pointed stars between them, and the eye keeps looking for an edge that isn’t there. M. C. Escher visited the Alhambra in 1922 and went back in 1936, spending days drawing its mosaics. You can see the debt in every interlocking lizard he drew afterward.
Fez is still the center of production, partly for a reason most people never hear: the local grey clay is mostly kaolinite, which fires well and takes glaze cleanly. The harder part is people. Apprentices traditionally start young and train for about a decade, and in 2018 only 7 of 400 students in Fez’s craft programs were enrolled in zellige. That number stays with us.
What makes handmade zellige look the way it does is not decoration at all. Each piece is hand cut and fired, so glaze pools a little differently on every one, and the joints wander by a hair. Lay a few hundred of them and a wall starts to shimmer. Machine-pressed “zellige look” tiles imitate the color but rarely that flicker, which is the part people actually fall for.
Azulejo, the wall as a newspaper
Portugal got its tile habit secondhand. King Manuel I saw Spanish tilework on a visit to Seville in 1503 and brought the techniques home. (The word azulejo shares its root with zellige, by the way, not with azul, though the blue makes that hard to believe.)
What Portugal did next is the interesting bit. It turned tile into narrative. Churches, palaces and stairwells filled with painted panels of saints, hunts, battles and city views. In the late 17th century Dutch blue and white tiles were so fashionable that King Peter II banned imports from 1687 to 1698 to protect local workshops, and the blue and white look became Portuguese in the process.
Then the ground moved. After the 1755 earthquake flattened much of Lisbon, the rebuilt city used tile in a plainer, faster, more practical way, and small devotional panels went up on buildings as a kind of insurance against the next disaster. Around 1840, returning emigrants started industrial production in Porto and brought a Brazilian fashion with them: tiling the whole outside of a house. That’s why a walk through Lisbon or Porto today feels like reading a street.
The story kept going underground. Between 1957 and about 1972, the artist Maria Keil designed large abstract tile panels for the first stations of the Lisbon Metro. She had given up on easel painting, and said she found it more useful to make things for architecture. We’d argue she was right!
It’s also a story of loss. Authorities estimate a quarter of Lisbon’s artistic tiles were lost between 1980 and 2000. A program called SOS Azulejo, started in 2007, cut theft and vandalism by around 80 percent by 2013. The best place to see what survived is the National Tile Museum, open since 1965 inside the Madre de Deus convent, which was founded in 1509.
Delft, a cheap substitute that became a language
Delft tiles have the least romantic origin of the three, and we love them for it. When the Wanli Emperor died in 1620, the flow of Chinese porcelain into Europe faltered, and Dutch potters started making a cheaper lookalike in tin-glazed earthenware. Over roughly two centuries they produced an estimated 800 million tiles. Nobody knows the real figure, because the factories barely kept records and rarely marked their work.
A typical Delft tile is about 13 centimeters square, and its job was humble. Rows of them protected the bottom of whitewashed walls, lined fireplaces and kitchens, and ran up staircases. Middle-class families often bought plain designs or factory seconds. But the pictures on them are where the storytelling happens: children playing games, sailing ships, windmills, tulips, farm animals, Bible scenes, and the occasional merman in a top hat! Taken together, a Dutch kitchen wall is a scrapbook of what a 17th-century household found worth looking at every day.
Most of the thirty or so factories are long gone. Royal Delft, founded in 1653, is one of the very few still working.
Why the old tiles feel new again
The current revival of handmade tile, from zellige backsplashes to painted panels behind a stove, is usually sold as a color trend. We think it’s something else. People are responding to the evidence of a hand: the uneven glaze, the slightly crooked joint, the small picture that someone painted on a Tuesday. Those three traditions were all, in different ways, about the same thing. Make a surface that lasts, and let it say something while it does.
If you want to go further back, a Roman mosaic unearthed under an Italian vineyard shows how old the habit really is. For something lighter, the Fauxsaics project imagines tile mosaics for cities around the world, and these “Fruit Salad” handmade tiles prove the painted tile still has a sense of humor.
