Terra-Cotta
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Terra-Cotta. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an Italian term for pottery pot or earthenware. The name is not pottery vessels with ordinarily applied to wa is confined to statues, thin walls, but statuettes, bas-reliefs, and architectural cornices, friemembers such as columns, like made of burnt zes, consoles, and the not necessarily clay. But the term is decorative charconfined to articles of a terra-cotta is either acter. The color of red, the former being buff, yellow, or masterpieces the more common. Many of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in this material, and a conare executed siderable number of works in burnt clay, artists who lived in the Midby Italian , dle Age and early Renaissance periods are also exquisite productions. Architeceffective kind tural ornaments of a very this material in were also executed in ancient times. Distinguished modern sculptors someand times produce works in terra-cotta, in recent years it has been increasingly or wholly, for employed, either partly of importhe fronts and other portions tant buildings.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a kind of earthenware. The term is applied to building material of a finer quality than ordinary brick, and particularly to unglazed pottery. The vases for which the Greeks were famous were made of terra cotta. Terra cotta pottery is found in the remains of Assyrian and Persian buildings. The vases of Etruria, still recognized as models in art schools, were of this material. The Japanese still excel in making groups, vases, and urns of terra cotta. In architecture, terra cotta is used frequently to mold cornices, water spouts, and other portions to save the expense of carving them out of stone. It is gaining in favor for walls. It expands only half as much as glass. Typical terra cotta is of a pinkish hue. See Pottery ; Brick
The Encyclopedia of Founding (1892)
This name is applied to figures, vases, statues, architectural decorations, etc., that have been cast or modelled in a compound of potter's-clay mixed with fine sand, pulverized potsherds, calcined flints, etc. These articles are burnt in the kiln after being dried in the air. Some of these productions resist the unfavorable influence of the weather much better than some stone. See STONE.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote in 1921 that terra-cotta was "increasingly employed" on the fronts of important buildings, it was describing a boom at its peak: glazed architectural terra-cotta clad American skyscrapers such as the Woolworth Building of 1913. That trade collapsed within a generation, as steel, glass and concrete curtain walls took over from the 1930s, and most of the great terra-cotta works closed; the material now survives mainly as a conservation problem on surviving facades, and as thin factory-made rainscreen panels hung on modern buildings. The largest change is archaeological rather than industrial: in 1974 well-diggers near Xi'an in China uncovered the buried army of life-size terracotta figures guarding the tomb of the first Qin emperor, thousands of them, a body of work in burnt clay on a scale none of these accounts could have imagined. Otherwise the basic description of the material stands fpulverized potsherds, calcined flints and clay have simply been standardized in modern industry.
Written for this edition, 2026.