The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-Painting Catalogue of a Private Collection Timothy Wilson

The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-Painting Catalogue of a Private Collection Timothy Wilson Allemandi Contents 7 Foreword by the Collector 9 Preface 14 Notes to Readers and Users of the Catalogue 17 Acknowledgements 19 Map of Italian Maiolica Centres THE CATALOGUE 23 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 55 THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 56 Deruta 56 Unlustred 88 Lustred 122 Faenza and the Faenza School 176 Urbino and the Duchy of Urbino 176 Istoriato 178 Nicola da Urbino 217 Francesco Xanto Avelli 262 Other Istoriato-Painters 291 Francesco Durantino 342 Ludovico and Angelo Picchi and “Andrea da Negroponte” 352 Belle Donne and Others 360 Ornamental Maiolica and White-Ground Grotesques 390 Gubbio 391 Maestro Giorgio of Gubbio 410 Tuscany 410 Siena 414 Montelupo 428 Cafaggiolo 431 Venice 450 Castelli and Orazio Pompei 475 THE AFTERLIFE OF ISTORIATO-PAINTING: THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 482 Glossary 484 Bibliography 504 Index Foreword by the Collector t has always been my belief that, in life, once one has met the satisfaction of one’s needs, though it is Iindeed possible to continue to accumulate wealth to consolidate and increase one’s own well-being and one’s own power, there is an alternative, instead of piling up money, to collect and enjoy works of art and perhaps share the pleasure of things one has managed to assemble. There are some who, in the past, have managed to combine both, sometimes considering making collections as an expression of wealth and a means of intimidation. But there are many who have made sacrifices, sometimes reducing their own needs to a minimum, for the enjoyment and the enrichment that works of art, with their beauty and wealth of historic and cultural resonances, can offer to them and to others. When, as in our case, we are dealing with the maiolica of the Italian Renaissance, someone like me, who has had the good fortune to be born and grow up in Italy, though afterwards to work abroad for much of his life, has come to notice that the works produced by our artists in that period are much more appreciated and passionately cared-for beyond the Alps. This is in itself a tangible proof of the universality of the beauty created by Italian maiolica-painters. I often think of the Parthenon marbles, the Venus de Milo, the Victory of Samothrace, works which express the incomparable peak of achievement reached by the artistic production of Greece in the history of world sculpture. I have the same feelings when, shifting attention from sculpture to ceramics, I find myself in front of the istoriato maiolica of the most important artists of our Renaissance – the sensation, indeed, of having before me the greatest artistic expression in the history of world ceramics. Each time I rediscover the mysterious, magical beauty achieved in Renaissance Italy, and by some artists in particular: Urbino, Gubbio, Pesaro, Castel Durante, Siena, Deruta, Faenza, Castelli, Venice... I am aware that one must be mindful to connect Urbino with Raphael, as well as with the Duke of Montefeltro who had built there his palace, that unique masterpiece in the universal history of architecture. However, I believe it is no less important in the history of art to keep in mind another fact, that in the first half of the sixteenth century, alongside the emergence of the giants of painting and sculpture – Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo – Urbino asserted itself as the focus of production, including artistic formation and the creation of a creative milieu, for the greatest Italian maiolica-artists – Nicola da Urbino, Francesco Xanto Avelli, Francesco Durantino. It was in Urbino that istoriato, that is to say, Renaissance painting transferred to ceramics, found the conditions, the fertile soil, to attain the highest point of the art of ceramics. To form a collection of these treasures with love and respect is a way, it seems to me, to give meaning to life and to render a service to humanity beyond ourselves. FOREWORD BY THE COLLECTOR 7 Preface aiolica is among the quintessential Mexpressions of Italian Renaissance art. Not only is it one of the most visually vivid of all art forms, preserving its colours exactly as they left the maker’s workshop, but of all forms of painting it is arguably the one that, with its range of serious and less serious secular subject matter, brings us closest to the pulse of Renaissance life and culture. It is a domestic but not a private art: maiolica was often commissioned by or given to women, sometimes by other women, and adorned domestic spaces, including ones where visitors were received. These beautiful objects, even the istoriato which has been this collector’s special interest, were never too good to use – they were always for their original owners cheaper than precious metal or Chinese porcelain – and formed part of the daily life of their owners. Istoriato was especially used in the context of country villas, with music and literary conversation, where the rich representation of classical subject matter, for instance, gives us a feeling for how Renaissance men and women absorbed and FIG. 2. RELIEF-BLUE JUG, FLORENCE, FIRST QUARTER OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. PRESENTED BY THE COLLECTOR TO THE perceived the culture of the classical world that BARGELLO IN FLORENCE. was coming to have a higher profile in the life and consciousness of cultured people. This collection is, I believe, the most important and substantial assemblage of sixteenth-century maiolica in private hands anywhere. Were it a museum, that museum would hold one of the “top twenty” collections of High Renaissance Italian pottery in the world. The great strength of the collection and the principal love of the collector is the istoriato of Urbino and its district, but Tuscany, Deruta, Faenza, Gubbio, Venice, and Castelli are all represented with outstanding pieces. Included here is a substantial group of fifteenth- FIG. 1. ON A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ROMAN MARBLE TABLETOP, A JUDITH FROM THE WORKSHOP OF GIOVANNI DELLA ROBBIA STANDS BETWEEN A MARBLE RELIEF ATTRIBUTED TO ANTONIO MINELLO AND A BRONZE VASE ATTRIBUTED TO VALERIO CIOLI. BENEATH IS A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY VENETIAN GLASS JUG. ABOVE ARE TWO PLATES, NOS 32 AND 28 IN THIS CATALOGUE. PREFACE 9 century pieces, not as “precursors” to the art of the sixteenth century, but as eloquent creations in their own right. A small epilogue gives a taste of some developments in istoriato-painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collector regards these pieces, put together with care and passion and with an unfailing eye for quality, as things to live with alongside other works of art of different types and periods, as shown in the four photographs of his homes included here (figs 1, 3–5). He also, as made clear in his Foreword above, regards his collecting as an expression of commitment to Italian Renaissance culture. His public spirit has led him to make significant and appropriate gifts to the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence (figs 2 and 76) and to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Objects like the ones described here have flowed from great collection to great collection and carry with them an aura created by their having passed through the hands of the most discriminating collectors of the past, men (almost always men, as it happens) united to the present collector across time by a shared delight in these works of art. Maiolica in this collection has belonged to the greatest collections in Europe 10 PREFACE FIG. 3. AGAINST AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AUBUSSON TAPESTRY, ON A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH OAK BENCH, AN ENAMELLED PLATE OF A TYPE TRADITIONALLY ATTRIBUTED TO VENICE IS BETWEEN NOS 206 AND 212 IN THE CATALOGUE. THE CARPET IS NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERSIAN. FIG. 4. MAIOLICA DISPLAYED ON EITHER SIDE OF A FIFTEENTH- CENTURY ISTRIAN STONE FIREPLACE; BENEATH AN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY VENETIAN MIRROR IS A BRONZE, THE GLADIATOR, BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO. THE MIRROR BETWEEN THE WINDOWS (THROUGH WHICH A FAMOUS PARIS SQUARE CAN BE GLIMPSED) IS EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GENOESE. PREFACE 11 and beyond over the last three hundred years: the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Geremia Delsette, Ferdinando Pasolini Dall’Onda, Serafino Tordelli, Alessandro Castellani, Cleto Cucci, Paolo Sprovieri, Riccardo Tondolo, and the “Italika collection” in Italy; Sir Andrew Fountaine, Ralph Bernal, Alexander Barker, Thomas Berney, Sir Francis Cook, Henry Harris, Stephen Courtauld, and Robert Strauss in England; Gustave de Rothschild, Charles Damiron, Paul Gillet, Fernand Adda, and Alain Moatti in France; Richard Zschille and Alfred Pringsheim in Germany; John Pierpont Morgan, William Randolph Hearst, Robert Lehman, Robert Bak, and Arthur Sackler in America. The collection was begun in London in the 1980s but achieved its present pre-eminence through acquisitions, mainly at auction in London, Paris, and elsewhere, between 2011 and 2017. A “Holy Grail” of active art collecting, whether for museums or for private individuals, is to focus on the best things available in an area which is not at the time high fashion with wealthy collectors. Maiolica, though prices have risen steadily on the international art market since the 1970s, is still relatively far cheaper than it was between 1855 and 1925, when wealthy collectors in Britain, France, Germany, and America competed for prime examples. In 1861 the National Gallery in London paid £240 for Piero Della Francesca’s monumental Baptism, one of the greatest of all Quattrocento paintings; the same year the English collector Andrew Fountaine paid twice that sum for a roundel from the workshop of Maestro Giorgio, dated 1525 (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London). It is a parlour game to wonder what the comparative values would be now, but the Piero would surely fetch on the international art market at least two hundred times what would be paid for the maiolica roundel.

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