Medici porcelain was the first successful attempt in Europe to make imitations of Chinese porcelain. The experimental manufactory housed in the Casino of San Marco in Florence existed between 1575 and 1587 under the patronage of Francesco I de\' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

When Francesco died, his younger brother Cardinal Ferdinando de\' Medici inherited the position of Grand Duke. Ferdinando brought his prized Chinese and Medici porcelains back with him to Florence from the Villa Medici in Rome, along with his paintings and treasured Roman antiquities. But with the ubiquity of European soft-paste and hard-paste porcelains in the eighteenth century, the Medici heirs in the House of Lorraine came to value less and less the imperfect Medici porcelains, with their minute firing cracks and bubbled glazes. In 1772 an auction in the Palazzo Vecchio of objects from storage dispersed the Medici porcelains conserved in Tuscany. The venture disappeared from history until interest revived after the mid-nineteenth century. The 1588 inventory drawn up after Francesco\'s death listed 310 pieces. Today only some sixty or seventy pieces are known to survive.

The next successful European attempt to make soft-paste porcelain would come from the Rouen manufactory in France, in 1673.

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